The Cozy Mystery List Blog

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.