The Cozy Mystery List Blog

Cozy Mystery (and Other Favorite) Books, Movies, and TV

Jenn McKinlay: Library Lover’s Mystery Series

You know you have just finished a true Cozy when immediately after the last chapter you find supplemental appendices with such subjects as “The Briar Creek Library Guide to Crafternoons,” a reader’s guide for a completely unrelated book (except that the characters in the Cozy read the book as part of their book group), “Lindsey’s Knitting Pattern for a Rolled Hat,” and, not one, but two recipes. After all, where else but at the end of a Cozy Mystery would you not be surprised to find such additions to the book?

All of this, and more, can be found in Jenn McKinlay‘s first book in her Library Lover’s Mystery Series, Books Can Be Deceiving, the next book in my series of posts discussing some of the most popular and recommended Cozy series. Jenn McKinlay is actually on this list twice now. In 2016, I wrote about the first book in her Cupcake Bakery Mystery Series, Sprinkle With Murder. If you’d like to read what I said back then about Sprinkle With Murder, please click here.  

Books Can Be Deceiving begins not long after Lindsey Norris has moved to Briar Creek to be the head of the public library. Briar Creek is a quaint, small town on the shore of Connecticut. Not too surprisingly, Lindsey had recently broken up with her fiance and had lost her job due to budget cuts at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale. She landed on her feet, however, partly due to her best friend Beth’s help. Beth now works for Lindsey as the children’s librarian. Lindsey has a landlord, Mary, who runs a seafood restaurant in downtown Briar Creek (hence the recipe for Chowder in the appendices of the book). And, Lindsey runs a weekly reading group that combines crafting with reading – hence, the “…Guide to Crafternoons.”

Of course, a Cozy being a Cozy, there is soon a murder, and the small-town chief of police (who is something of a dunderhead) jumps to the wrong conclusion and suspects Lindsey’s best friend of being involved. Lindsey (and others) are soon deeply involved in running their own investigation; and, they won’t rest until the real culprit is found and brought to justice.

Reading Books Can Be Deceiving reminded me of just why I was drawn to Cozies so many years ago.  The setting is attractive and charming. I wish I lived there or at least had the chance to visit Briar Creek. The people have taken to Lindsey quickly, even though real small towns are probably much more suspicious of “outsiders.” But, the worlds Cozies are set in sure seem more attractive than the real ones do sometimes.

Lindsey is young and bright and has a lot to offer the town. She makes friends easily, and the possibilities for romance are never far away. And, the mystery is interesting and multifaceted. 

There are good reasons why Jenn McKinlay (who also writes as Josie Belle & Lucy Lawrence) has so many successful series going (six). The Library Lover’s Mystery Series already has twelve entries (and this is not her longest series!) Her writing style is fluid, her settings are charming and her mysteries are interesting. I highly recommend Books Can Be Deceiving.

If you’re interested in seeing more highlights of some of the most recommended or popular Cozy Mystery authors/series, visit the Most Popular & Recommended Cozy Mystery Series page on my site.

Eve Calder: Cookie House Mystery Series

Today, as part of my ongoing effort to highlight the most often recommended Cozy Mystery series by site readers, I’ll be discussing the first in Eve Calder‘s Cookie House Mystery Series, titled And Then There Were Crumbs.

Released in July 2019 (just a bit over two years before I wrote this article), I’m not sure offhand if I’ve ever discussed a novel as recent as this one. It’s definitely one of the most “modern” Cozies I’ve read for the site, and if you’re a fan of modern Cozies, you’re likely to really enjoy a lot of what this novel has to offer.

Kate McGuire, a classically trained pastry chef, has decided to make a big change in her life by leaving the big city, her familiar job, and an estranged fiance by moving to a scenic small town, Coral Cay, a tourist town in southern Florida. Unfortunately, Kate isn’t fortunate enough to have a small town family with a struggling business looking for help, or a recently deceased great-aunt, or another shortcut to success in small town life, so she’s having a bit of trouble finding a job on short notice and low savings. Eventually she settles on what at first seems like the worst possible cooking-related job in town, working for curmudgeonly Sam Hepplewhite, owner of The Cookie House – a bakery that most definitely does not own cookies – for below minimum wage, though she does manage to talk him into letting her bunk in an unused storeroom upstairs from the shop.

This turns out to possibly be a mistake, as her first night staying over in the shop, Kate hears the sounds of what must be a break-in. The local police aren’t too interested, assuming that the poorly-secured back door was just jimmied by some teenagers “up to mischief.” Sam seems a bit more concerned – he has a deadbolt installed the next day, as well as a landline phone installed upstairs for Kate in case of another emergency – but Kate begins thinking there’s more going on than she’s been told about.

And quickly sees that this instinct was correct. It becomes apparent that  local real estate magnate is looking to buy The Cookie House – though whether Sam is interested in selling seems open to debate. Eventually, the possible purchaser turns up dead – probably of poison, and just after being fed by Sam, Sam quickly becomes the primary suspect.

As I said earlier, in many ways, And Then There Were Crumbs is more or less the archetypical modern Cozy. It has the “moving to a small town to start over” angle, a food related gimmick in frequent mentions of baked goods like cookies and breads, and interesting locals in a scenic setting. Fortunately, it does all of these things rather well. I also particularly appreciate that it gets to the murder mystery relatively quickly. So, if you’re up for a modern Cozy with a baking theme that gets to the point a bit more quickly than some of its peers, I can suggest And Then There Were Crumbs.

If you’re interested in seeing more highlights of some of the most recommended or popular Cozy Mystery authors/series, visit the Most Popular & Recommended Cozy Mystery Series page on my site.

Lynn Cahoon: The Farm to Fork Mystery Series

Lynn Cahoon, the author whose series I am highlighting this month as part of my Most Popular & Recommended Cozy Mystery Series posts, has become so popular since 2014 when her first book was released that she already has four series of mystery books. This one, the Farm to Fork Mystery Series is the second of her series that I have featured in these posts. You can find my write up of Tourist Trap Mystery Series here.

This month, I read the first book in the Farm to Fork series, Who Moved My Goat Cheese?.  As the story begins, Angie Turner has recently relocated to the little town of River Vista, a bedroom community near Boise, Idaho, to live in her recently deceased grandmother’s (Nona’s) house and open a restaurant, “The County Seat”, with her best friend Felicia Williams.

This is the second restaurant that Angie and Felicia have co-owned. After meeting in culinary school and becoming best friends, they had opened their first place, el pescado, in the San Francisco area five years before. When the lease expired, the landlord wanted more than the restaurant could afford, so they closed it, and, as Who Moved My Goat Cheese? begins, the friends are planning the opening of their new venture.

Angie is to be the head chef. Felicia is more business-oriented and plans to run the business side of things along with the front of the house. (Somewhat refreshingly, neither Angie nor Felicia seem to have converted to restaurateurs from some other profession (often law) as is common in Cozies nowadays.)

While planning the opening and searching for suppliers in order to meet the farm-to-fork requirement for their new venture, Angie meets a number of farmers, one of whom is soon found murdered. As befitting a true Cozy Mystery sleuth, Angie just can’t seem to mind her own business, and soon she is doing her own investigation to find out who murdered her (very new) friend.

The book has a lot of very attractive features — Angie’s Nona, even though she passed away before the story begins, is still a strong force in Angie’s life. Many of the recipes that Angie works on in the book (and there are quite a few) are based on Nona’s excellent home cooking. (A bonus recipe for potato soup is included in a note from the author at the end of the book.) Angie has a new St Bernard puppy, Dom and inherits a baby goat, Precious. 

The little town of River Vista seems like a nice place to live (except for the murders, of course). Angie meets a bunch of interesting people including one or more love interests.

All told, Who Moved the Goat Cheese? is a classic modern Cozy which does a great job of setting the table (pun intended) for this new Lynn Cahoon series. I can see why she has so many fans — she is a new writer to take note of, for sure.

If you’re interested in seeing more highlights of some of the most recommended or popular Cozy Mystery authors/series, visit the Most Popular & Recommended Cozy Mystery Series page on my site.

Lee Harris: Christine Bennett Holiday Mystery Series

There are a lot of good Cozy mystery series out there, many of them new even to me despite running this website. Still, sometimes, instead of trying out something new, I have the urge to go back to a series that I have particularly fond memories of, both to see how it holds up today and to have an opportunity to present it to an audience that may not be as familiar with it. Today I’ll be revisiting an old favorite, a mystery series that started in the 1990s, making it something of a “blast from the past” now, almost thirty years later – which certainly makes me feel old, as I believe I was reading most of these as they came out originally! Specifically, the book I’ll be discussing is The Good Friday Murder, the first entry in Lee Harris’s Christine Bennett Holiday Mystery Series.

As in so many other modern Cozies, Christine Bennett is in the middle of a change of lifestyle, but not from the now-normalized transition from “big city professional” to “small town hobby-shop owner”. Instead, Christine has recently left convent life, having spent the last fifteen years of her life as a nun at St. Stephen’s. Though she had planned to leave the convent for a year, when the book begins she has only recently moved to Oakwood, New York, where her recently deceased Aunt Meg left her a house.

One of the reasons she is determined to stay in Oakwood is that her cousin Gene, a mentally disabled man living in the nearby community of Greenwillow. Greenwillow wants to move to Oakwood, but the Oakwood city council objects on a number of reasons – the largest of which is that, forty years ago, another resident of the community was accused of the murder of his mother. Christine doesn’t believe that the murder was committed by the resident, and agrees to try to change the council’s mind – even if that means investigating a murder now over forty years old.

As you can probably tell from the above description, this particular brand of Cozy is a bit less “kooky” and “zany” than many of its modern equivalents. There’s a far more restrained atmosphere to Oakwood than most modern Cozy neighborhoods – the residents are mostly sympathetic, but hardly as “colorful” as is often the case nowadays.

All told, I’d recommend this book as both a “blast from the past” and an “oldie but goodie”. It’s definitely not quite in the same mold as modern Cozies, but if you’re looking for something with a bit of a more serious angle to it, this is definitely a great series to pick up.

One thing I’ll warn readers is that some of the terminology in the book is quite dated. Now the term “retarded” is generally intended as a juvenile insult, but it was considered an accurate medical term both at the time that the novel was written and in the era that the murder took place, so please keep that in mind when reading.

Click here to read more posts about the most popular and recommended Cozy Mystery series.

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