This month, as part of my series looking at the most popular and recommended Cozy mystery series by site readers, I’m taking a look at the first in Peggy Ehrhart‘s Knit & Nibble Mystery Series, titled Murder, She Knit. This is another “relatively” recent Cozy, starting in 2018.

Pamela Paterson is a widow living in the small town of Arborville, New Jersey, whose only daughter has recently left home for college, as well as an associate editor of Fiber Craft, a crafting magazine. Additionally, she’s a founding member of the local knitting club, Knit and Nibble. At the beginning of the novel, she reconnects with one of her husband’s colleagues, architect Amy Morgan, who has recently moved to Arborville to teach at the local community college. As Amy is a fellow knitter, Pamela invites her to join the next Knit and Nibble meeting.

Unfortunately, Amy never makes it to the club meeting, which Pamela at first assumes is because she forgot the house or had something come up. However, after the meeting, while looking for a dish she had left out for a local stray cat (Catrina), Pamela finds the real reason – Amy’s body, dead in a nearby hedge, stabbed to death by a metal knitting needle. Naturally, it will eventually fall on Pamela to help investigate the case – with a little help from her daughter, Catrina, and her fellow Knit and Nibblers.

Aside from the murder (and no doubt many more in future books), Arborville is a very pleasant suburban community, with both plenty of local charm and friendly characters. Most of the cast is relatively “grounded” – there are few “zany” or “wacky” locals, and Pamela is already a well-established member of the community, having lived there for several decades. On the whole, it gives off a warm, comforting feeling – again, except for the murder parts, which are almost always a bit incongruous with the theme of Cozy settings.

All told, this is a very nice modern Cozy with a more relaxed and less manic setting than can often be found in modern Cozies. I also appreciated that the main character appears uninterested in an immediate romantic interest, despite her friends and daughter pushing her towards one – I don’t mind a bit of romance in my Cozies, but often it becomes too much of a central focus, so this was a nice change of pace. The knitting theme is also relevant to the mystery, giving it something of an advantage over mysteries where the theme is just sort of something the sleuth does on the side disconnected from the crime. I would recommend this to any fan of modern Cozies, particularly one who is interested in knitting or other needlework.

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

PS: This Cozy includes both a brief knitting tutorial for a scarf and a recipe for an apple cake.

As part of the long-ongoing series where I look at the most popular and recommended Cozy mystery series put forward by site readers, I’m once again moving into unfamiliar territory – at least by series – with the Dorothy St. James title, The Broken Spine. I specify unfamiliar with the series because I have read books by Dorothy St. James before, but nothing in this, the Beloved Bookroom Mystery Series, which only started last year in 2021. That definitely puts this in the running as one of the most recent series that I’ve read for this series.

As is likely obvious from the title of both series and book, this is one of the more popular topics in Cozy fiction – books about books – very “meta”. Trudell Becket (sometimes “Tru” to her friends), the librarian of a library in the town of Cypress, South Carolina, is campaigning against the conversion of the library to a “bookless” library, one that focuses primarily on the lending of electronic books. When the books are finally all scheduled to be removed and dumped in a landfill, Trudell and a group of friends break into the library at night, determined to save at least some of the books from destruction by housing them in a now-abandoned bomb shelter built in World War II under the library.

Unfortunately, while moving books down into the basement, Trudell and her friends are surprised by the sound of a crash, which Trudell quickly determines came from a shelf of DVDs falling onto the town manager – the very person who had led the campaign to move the library to a bookless format. Naturally, Trudell is a leading candidate for the murder – not only was she vocally opposed to the transition, she was also in the library at the time of the death. Also naturally, she also has a somewhat complicated relationship with one of the local detectives, a former high school classmate of hers, though in this case he is the one who has recently returned to the town.

There’s definitely an obvious irony in the method of how I read this particular book – on my Kindle, taking advantage of the variable type size. My eyes aren’t what they once were, and while I was initially skeptical of moving to an electronic format, the option of having several hundred books in a single package lighter than a paperback and lit for easy bedroom reading has definitely made the transition smoother. That said, I personally don’t think that the electronic format should fully replace the printed word, and certainly still appreciate the charm of actual paper books – there’s a certain physicality to them that isn’t possible for Kindles, and I still find browsing through pages for a detail I want to recall easier than working backwards through a Kindle. So I can see both sides of the paper vs. electronic argument.

I really enjoyed reading this book. Being a Cozy about books and book lovers, it certainly covers a lot of old ground, but it also discusses newer issues like electronic books – though admittedly in an often obviously biased way.

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

This month I am highlighting another “blast from the past” (as the oldies radio stations used to say) in the continuance of my series of posts about the most popular and recommended Cozy mystery series.  Elizabeth Peters‘ Amelia Peabody series began way back in 1975 with Crocodile on the Sandbank and continued until 2017 with the 20th book in the series co-written by Joan Hess, no less. 

Crocodile on the Sandbank is, at its heart, an adventure (with some romance thrown in!) story. Set in Victorian times in the 19th century, the story is narrated in the first person by Amelia Peabody, a (mostly) enlightened no-nonsense woman who unexpectedly receives an inheritance that allows her a certain amount of freedom. She resolves to use some of the money to travel to Europe and ultimately Egypt. 

Along the way, she encounters a young disinherited heiress who has fainted in the ruins of the Roman Forum. Amelia swoops in to save the day. Ultimately, Amelia hires the young woman, Evelyn Barton-Forbes to be her traveling companion, and the adventures and mysterious occurrences begin. 

The pair travel to Egypt. Amelia has a special interest in Egyptology (as had her father), and it turns out she also has a gift for archeology.  Of course, in the 19th century, archeology as a true science was pretty new, and women were discouraged from pursuing any vocation outside of the home. So, even though there are many obstacles in her way, Amelia more or less falls into the field of Egyptology which becomes one of the passions of her life.

Crocodile on the Sandbank is written in what I would call a classic style. The first-person narrative unfolds at a quite leisurely pace. The mystery takes quite a few pages to begin to unfold. If you are someone who wants a murder to happen within the first few pages of a cozy mystery, you must look elsewhere! But, if you are looking for something a bit different — more like a mystery and adventure movie from the 1930s or 40s, this story, I think, will fulfill your wishes.

Elizabeth Peters (aka Barbara Michaels and Barbara Mertz) writes a compelling story set in the world of 19th century Egyptology. She had a Ph.D. in Egyptology from the University of Chicago, so it is not surprising that the details about archeology and Egyptian history seem (to my untrained eye at least) invariably accurate. The narrative is very well written, and though the pace seems leisurely, I guess that is what I was in the mood for because I found it difficult to put the book down as I followed Amelia and Evelyn’s adventures.

A few words of warning should be given, however. I said earlier that Amelia Peabody is “mostly” enlightened for a reason. Although for a Victorian British woman, Amelia is extremely enlightened from a feminist point of view, she still is a woman of her times from the point of view of paternalistic colonialism. I think her point of view is portrayed correctly from the standpoint of a British woman who is writing in the 19th century. But our modern sensibilities toward colonialism are not well represented.

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