Lee Hollis: Hailey Powell Mystery Series

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…