Most Popular and Recommended Mystery Series

Julia Buckley: A Writer’s Apprentice Mystery Series

January 23, 2020

This month I read A Dark and Stormy Murder which is the first book in Julia Buckley’s A Writer’s Apprentice Mystery Series. This post is another in my (mostly) monthly series about the most popular and recommended Cozy Mystery series.

The book introduces us to Lena London, a young want-to-be author who is fresh out of school and also fresh out of a long term romantic relationship. As the story begins, Lena receives a call from one of her best friends, Allison, who lives in Blue Lake, Indiana. Allison happens to be in a Saturday morning knitting group with Camille Graham, Lena’s favorite author and idol. Allison had shared Lena’s unpublished novel (which was inspired by Camille’s writing) and Camille had loved it! Now Camille has a job proposal for Allison.

Before you know it, Lena has a job with Camille to work as her writing assistant (hence the “apprentice” in the series’ name) and has moved, with her cat Lestrade, to beautiful Blue Lake, Indiana to live with Camille in her old and mysterious mansion.

Suffice it to say that Lena is more than over the moon to be working with her idol in a job that is too good to be called her dream job – Lena had never dreamed so big!

Being a Cozy Mystery, before long and as expected, Lena discovers a body on the shore of Blue Lake not far from Camille’s house. This gives Lena the chance to get acquainted with the local (handsome) and available police detective, Doug. On her first day in Blue Lake, Lena also meets Camille’s mysterious (and also handsome) neighbor, Sam West.

Sam is a rich investor from New York City who is living in Blue Lake to avoid the spotlight of the big city since his estranged wife is missing under mysterious circumstances and Sam is generally suspected of having committed foul play towards her. As Lena gets to know Sam, she joins a very short list of people (which includes Camille) who believe that Sam had nothing to do with his wife’s disappearance.

So the book entails Lena and Camille, sometimes with Doug’s assistance, trying to solve the mysterious murder near Camille’s house. And Lena also gets involved in trying to help Sam solve the mystery of his estranged wife’s disappearance.

With two mysteries to solve, a mysterious old mansion on the lake, strange noises around the house in the middle of the night, two handsome potential suitors, a cat and two dogs, and a charming small midwestern town, this book and series have just about all the elements that one could expect or want in a lovely Cozy Mystery read. I found A Dark and Stormy Murder to be a fun and light read — just the kind of book I like to curl up with on a chilly, rainy winter day.

I must warn you, however, that the book does not resolve all the mysteries that are presented. You will have to read at least one more book in the series to find out all the secrets. Since I enjoyed this book so much, I don’t have a problem with this, even though I’m not crazy about multiple book storyline arcs in my Cozies. I’m looking forward to finding out what Lena and Camille discover in the other books in the series.

If you’d like to see other entries about some of the most recommended Cozy Mystery authors, be sure to check out the Most Popular and Recommended Cozy Mystery Series page on my site.

Vivien Chien: Noodle Shop Mystery Series

December 28, 2019

First off, I want to wish everyone a happy holiday! I’m having a good holiday myself – definitely enjoying my daughter’s visit. (I don’t have time to read much around the holidays, so this is actually a post I wrote a few weeks ago. So I might still be a bit slower on approving comments for a while longer.)

So, the Cozy I read this month was the first entry in Vivien Chien‘s Noodle Shop Mystery Series, titled Death by Dumpling.

In many ways, I would call this a very traditional modern-style Cozy. Half-Taiwanese, half-English Lana Lee has recently come off of a bad breakup, as well as quitting her job that she wasn’t happy at, and is spending time working at her family’s noodle house until she can pull her life back together. Though she hadn’t seen herself working there in her late twenties, she’s making the best of things until the area’s landlord is found dead – apparently killed by an allergic reaction caused by the dumplings she brought to him for his regular lunch delivery.

Naturally, there’s an irritating-but-hunky detective investigating the case, many neighbors all with their own theories (and varying levels of eccentricity), and unusual behavior on the part of the bereaved family and many others in the community.

So far, no doubt this all sounds like very familiar ground. Fortunately, what really helps make this book feel different from the many other Cozies like it is the interesting and unusual backdrop for a Cozy in Cleveland’s Asian Village.

While I still love the traditional quaint villages of England and New England alike, every so often it is nice to see a slightly different backdrop for otherwise comfortable Cozy elements, and setting the story in an area that feels culturally different feels like something of a breath of fresh air.

At the same time, many of the useful conventions of the Cozy genre can still apply – while the community might be part of a “big city” like Cleveland, the residents of the Asia Village have their own distinct community that an outsider (like the police, investigating the death of one of the residents) might find harder to penetrate.

Altogether, Death by Dumpling brings together a mystery that has a unique setting for the Cozy genre, one that (at least to me) feels as authentic as the Amish villages, New England fishing towns, and English countryside communities that are more often the hallmark of the Cozy subgenre. At the same time, it retains enough of the “Cozy” elements that I know we’re all looking for to help relax with a good book. If you’re looking for a familiar Cozy with an interestingly different sort of backdrop from the usual Cozy village, then I think that you’ll find something to like in Death by Dumpling.

If you want to read some of the other entries about highly recommended Cozy Mystery series, you can see them on the Most Recommended Cozy Mystery Series page.

Jacqueline Frost: The Christmas Tree Farm Mystery Series

November 20, 2019

It’s the time of the year to start thinking about the upcoming holidays. Living in San Antonio where snow is only a distant memory, I find it hard sometimes to get in the mood without a proper boost from a Christmas Cozy. So, this month I read the first in a very new series by Jacqueline Frost, The Twelve Slays of Christmas, part of her new Christmas Tree Farm Mystery series. This post is part of my series where I am writing about the most popular and recommended Cozy Mystery series.

The Twelve Slays of Christmas has just about the coziest setting possible — a family-owned Christmas tree farm that is part of a historic small town, Mistletoe, Maine. On the farm, which also has a cafe, “The Hearth” and other shops open during the holiday season, games are played for the twelve days of Christmas — the “Reindeer Games”. Each day a different holiday-related game is played. Tourists flock by the busload to the town to play these games and to bask in the holiday atmosphere that this quaint farm and historic town provide.

The story begins with Holly White, the 24-year-old daughter of the owners of the farm just having returned from Portland Maine. She had just been jilted by her fiance just days before her scheduled wedding. So, she returns home with her cat, “Cindy Lou Who”, and falls back into her old routine of helping with the games and the farm. Of course, a murder occurs which causes all who work at the farm to fall under suspicion. And, the farm has to be closed which places Holly’s parents’ livelihood in jeopardy since over half of their income is associated with the holiday season.

Holly begins her investigation in parallel with the new sheriff in town, Sheriff Evan Gray. Sheriff Gray just happens to be young, single and very good looking. Holly also soon meets a local newspaper reporter who also is young, good looking and available. Readers of modern Cozies will probably see where this is going pretty early in the book.

If the elements of The Twelve Slays of Christmas seem pretty familiar to seasoned Cozy readers, the way the book is put together with such lively charm and with so many holiday-related elements, made this book pretty irresistible to me, especially since I was looking for a way to help me get into the holiday mood. And, Holly is such an attractive heroine — her plucky character somehow reminds me of (an older) Nancy Drew. The way she picks herself up from personal adversity and gets back into the routine at her parents’ farm while simultaneously investigating the murder that threatens to ruin her parents’ farm’s income and reputation, is portrayed in such a lively way that I just kept turning the pages. What higher praise can I give a book!

If you want to read some of the other entries about highly recommended Cozy Mystery series, you can see them on the Most Recommended Cozy Mystery Series page.

P.S. By the way, this Christmas Cozy got me in such a winter-ized mood that I had my two tech-guys (my husband and son) bring in the Christmas bins from our garage over the weekend. I know it’s a little early for decorating – with Thanksgiving still down the calendar road, but I needed this winter Cozy! I walked Cocoa (our three year-old Yorkie “puppy”) two hours before writing this entry in 73* weather!

Kaitlyn Dunnett: Liss MacCrimmon Mystery Series

October 10, 2019

This month I tried something a little different for my series talking about the most popular and recommended Cozy Mysteries – rather than start (or re-read, as the case is sometimes) a series from the beginning, I decided instead to jump right into the middle of an existing series so I could enjoy a little of the current “festive atmosphere” that Cozies are often so good at – specifically, Halloween. In doing so, I decided to read Vampires, Bones and Treacle Scones, the seventh entry in Kaitlyn Dunnett’s Liss MacCrimmon Mystery Series.

As a quick summary of how the novel starts, Liss MacCrimmon, now owner of a Scottish themed emporium in Moosetookalok, Maine, is heading up the town’s Halloween fundraiser, and as part of the festivities they plan to hold a haunted house at the old Chadwick mansion, an abandoned property long owned by the town after the death of the last of the Chadwick’s years ago. However, attempts to spruce up the old mansion are having mixed successes – the building is certainly creepy enough, still holding odd collections amassed by the eccentric residents over the decades they lived there, but a series of odd pranks and unexplained events within the mansion have unsettled everyone involved at least once. So, in classic Cozy fashion, it’s no surprise when a corpse turns up in the house – though it is more than a bit of a surprise that it turns out to be the body of someone Liss sent to jail in a previous mystery! (I don’t want to spoil which one for fans who may have read some previous entries in the series)

The good news is that I ended up liking the book quite a bit. Despite jumping into the middle of the series, all of the characters were quickly explained and made good impressions quickly enough that I had no trouble keeping them straight. Likewise, though the mystery connects to a previous case, I felt like it was explained well enough to make sure I had no trouble understanding the mystery at hand. In fact, both the identity of the victim and several other elements mentioned help make the book feel well connected to the series as a whole – a nice change to some series, where it feels like people shake off their friends, neighbors, and relatives killing each other perhaps just a bit too easily!

Unfortunately, the book did fail in one regard. I went into this book specifically to read a Halloween novel, so I was more than a bit surprised that only the first third or so of the book took place around Halloween! After that, there was a bit of a time skip, with the rest of the book taking place early in the following year. So, while the holiday theme was certainly strong for the first part, later elements certainly felt a lot less “Halloween-ey” – not entirely un-Halloween-ish, mind you, since a big spooky mansion was still featured prominently, but it was still a bit jarring.

That said, I do still strongly recommend this novel, and by extension the series as a whole. It does a good job showing continuity in a Cozy setting, something I’ve lacked lately as I’ve mostly been reading establishing novels for the site lately. It’s also quite well written, and the characters and setting are interesting and well fleshed out without feeling excessively “zany” to me. If you’re looking for a good Cozy read, feel free to pick this one up – just don’t be surprised if Halloween ends a little bit early.

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