Well, March is coming to an end, so it is time to once again review one of the most popular recommended mystery series put forward by site readers. This time I’ll be going with a relatively new series, the By the Book Mystery Series by Tamara Berry, starting with the first entry, Buried in a Good Book.

As with so many other Cozy protagonists at the beginning of their sleuthing careers, mystery author Tess Harrow is at a low point at the beginning of the series, hoping to recover and bond with her teenage daughter Gertie after Tess’s recent divorce. To that end, she and her daughter arrive at her grandfather’s cabin – and not minutes after arriving, the cabin is shaken by a series of explosions from the nearby woods, the last of which launches the arm of a several-days-old corpse directly at them when they go to investigate.

Supposedly, the explosion were the results of blast fishing gone wrong in a nearby pond – or at least, so claimed the man who immediately arrived and just as quickly fled the scene, long before Tess could so much as inform the local sheriff. However, even if that was the case, the discovery of the corpse in the lake is decidedly less innocent. Before long, Tess is wrapped up in the case, her curiosity sparked and her creative drive thriving from the real-world crime case that has fallen into her lap

Unsurprisingly, the few people located out in the tiny mountain town way out in the woods prove to be a somewhat eccentric group. The local sheriff looks just like the sleuth of Tess’s own mystery series, and seems to know almost as much about her books as Tess does. Someone dressed up in a bear costume is lurking in the woods, spurring an unsurprising number of ‘Bigfoot’ reports.

One thing I really appreciate about this mystery is that it really starts off with the mystery – the explosion mentioned above occurs within pages of the book’s beginning, so the entire novel is phrased at least partially around solving the case. And while there are certainly plenty of other features to the novel, the mystery really is the centerpiece here. Since Tess’s primary personal interest is in crime fiction, this is an excellent mystery for people who are looking to spend most of the reading time on sleuthing, not on descriptions of other hobbies like soap-making or baking. As lovely as those thematic diversions might be from time to time, there are also occasions where I really appreciate just getting down to some crime-solving!

I suppose that is the strongest recommendation I would make for Buried in a Good Book – this is definitely a modern Cozy for readers more interested in the mystery element of Cozies than the side elements.

As always, if you want to read more of these brief discussions of some of the more popular Cozy Mystery Series that I’ve written in the past, you can find them at the Most Recommended Cozy Mystery Series page.

The time has come once again for me to continue my many-many-many parts series in which I highlight a repeatedly recommended Cozy mystery series by reading the first entry and giving a brief little synopsis/review. This month, I read the first entry in Rhys Bowen‘s Royal Spyness Mystery Series, Her Royal Spyness.

This series, which is set in 1930s England, stars Lady Victoria Georgiana Charlotte Eugenie (Georgie to her friends), the daughter of a duke and a minor royal, 34th in line for the British throne. She comes from a long line of eccentrics, and while her branch of the family retained the titles, they had lost the last vestiges of their once significant wealth in the Great Depression. Naturally, this leaves her with a very complicated relationship with her surviving closer kin.

Georgie is spending time in London to avoid attempts to set her up with unpleasant suitors and trying to find a way to improve her life that doesn’t involve marrying an unpleasant Romanian prince who reminds her of cold fish. She’s staying in the family’s London home alone when she is confronted by Gaston de Mauxville, a Frenchman who claims that her now-deceased father bet the family castle in Scotland on a card game and lost, and now de Mauxville intends to collect. Naturally, he turns up dead in the bath several days later, and naturally, Georgie and her half-brother, the current Duke, were the natural suspects.

This long-running series, which began in 2007 and now contains 18 entries, isn’t the first of Bowen’s long-running mystery series – she’s also the author of the Evan Evans Mystery Series and the Molly Murphy Mystery Series, both of which are also very popular series. This really shows in the writing – often when I am reading one of these ‘first entries’, it can be apparent that the author is still finding their way and that their ‘style’ hasn’t really solidified yet. That isn’t the case here – it’s evident from the beginning that this is the work of an experienced writer.

This book certainly goes into significant detail regarding the lives of the British royal family in the early ’30s. I’m a little rusty on my aristocratic family tree from the early 20th century, so I often needed to frequently look up the relationships between the various royal branches that were being discussed, but more studios anglophiles, and particularly anyone with a particular interest in this period of British history, would certainly find lots of interest in this book. The downside of this is that the mystery does often take something of a backseat – I’ve mentioned before many times that I prefer when a mystery comes out front and center, but here the novel spends a long time discussing Georgie’s personal history and time in London before even a whiff of mystery begins. Fortunately, once it does begin, it proves quite engaging in its own right.

As always, if you want to read more of these brief discussions of some of the more popular Cozy Mystery Series that I’ve written in the past, you can find them at the Most Recommended Cozy Mystery Series page.

Well, it’s almost the end of the month, so it’s time to discuss my latest reading selection based on site reader recommendations. Today, I’ll be discussing the first entry in Diane Kelly‘s House-Flipper Mystery Series, Dead as a Door Knocker.

This series stars Whitney Whitaker, a property manager and construction fixer-upper in Nashville, Tennessee. Though her day job mostly involves dealing with routine problems occurring on properties she manages for a real estate business, her real passion is in fixing up eviction properties, abandoned houses, and otherwise decaying and mistreated buildings into desirable houses for a profit.

The other protagonist, Sawdust, is her cat. Yes, this is a cat-as-protagonist novel, at least for some chapters – though these chapters are shorter and least frequent than Whitney’s. They’re also told in third person, while Whitney’s are in first person. Some of them are also more relevant than others as well – the first few are mostly about either napping or attacking Whitney’s robot vacuum cleaner.

After evicting a trio of college students far behind on rent, Whitney is offered the opportunity to buy the property by the owner, who doesn’t want to bother with the renovation and repair, instead offering to sell to Whitney for a discount to fix up and flip. Whitney decides to spend some of the time working on the property living on-site, to both simplify travel and deter thieves, taking Sawdust over with her. However, the first night on the property, there is a fire, one that is quickly confirmed to be faulty wiring. Considering the house had been inspected just that morning and given a clean ‘bill of health’, it was a bad sign – one made even worse when Sawdust turns up a body in the flower bed. Naturally, the body belongs to the man who sold Whitney the house – a person that she and many other people had potential grudges against.

The details of the house-flipping business, including design details, are dealt with in relatively close detail, so if you have an interest in interior design or property management, this definitely hits an interesting niche that isn’t often dealt with in as much detail as is present in this book.

As always, if you want to read more of these brief discussions of some of the more popular Cozy Mystery Series that I’ve written in the past, you can find them at the Most Recommended Cozy Mystery Series page.

First off, I hope everyone has been having a great holiday season! Ours has been a little less than ideal – due to our niece coming down with strep throat, my daughter and her family had to push back their holiday arrival – unfortunate but for the best. So they’ll be arriving soon for “Christmas 2” – the slightly delayed sequel to Christmas 1.

Anyway! That’s really just a minor side tangent to our actual post, which is a continuation to  my now-very-long-running series highlighting one of the many Cozy Mystery Series recommended by site readers. This month, I’ll be reading the first entry in Lee Hollis‘s Hailey Powell Mystery Series, Death of a Kitchen Diva.

Hayley Powell is a single mother in Bay Harbor, Maine, trying to balance a lot of spinning plates, raising two children, managing the office for the local paper the Island Times, taking over as the paper’s food and wine column writer, and (on a more immediate note) preparing for a date – but getting arrested in the opening scene of the novel certainly makes her even busier. This is an in medias res (‘into the middle of things’) opening – the timeline quickly scans back one week to give more perspective of what’s going on, but it serves as a quick and effective ‘hook’ to highlight the stakes of the mystery getting resolved.

Flash back to a week ago and Hayley is just getting her new job as taking over the food and wine column, quickly proving a success in the small town newspaper industry, making a number of new friends – and a few new enemies, including rival paper’s food columnist, Karen Appelbaum, who publicly claimed Hayley had stolen her recipes. Naturally, Karen turns up dead, located by Hayley, apparently having just eaten a bowl of Hayley’s clam chowder, leading to Hayley as a lead suspect.

All told, Death of a Kitchen Diva is a very solid first entry in a modern-style Cozy mystery series, filled with interesting characters in a scenic, comforting setting (though as with all Cozy settings, one that just happens to include an unnaturally high crime rate after a few entries!). If you’re looking for a nice Cozy series that features food and writing as its main non-mystery themes, I can recommend Death of a Kitchen Diva.

As always, if you want to read more of these brief discussions of some of the more popular Cozy Mystery Series that I’ve written in the past, you can find them at the Most Recommended Cozy Mystery Series page.

PS: For those who are interested, this does include a number of recipes – not at the end as is usual in these sort of Cozies, but scattered throughout the book as Hayley writes her columns. It’s an interesting twist to deliver the recipes, but perhaps not the easiest for reference…