Can you believe that it’s time for us to get out our Jane Haddam, Lee Harris, and Leslie Meiers books!? Yep! It’s time to start reading books that depict a sunny spring outside… Of course, if you live near me (San Antonio, Texas) you don’t really need to "bring the spring" into your house… It’s already here!
But, as I have said many, many times before… I love to read seasonal books. So, I will be getting my Easter Mysteries off of my bookshelf… (If I have any left!)
I know, however, that Spring isn’t here for everyone. My sister lives in Chicago, my college roommate lives in Iowa, and my mother lives in Colorado. I think that this is the time of year that they most wish they were my immediate neighbors. Of course, when Fall is just around the corner, I wish I were up where any of those three live… enjoying the beautiful crisp weather and the dazzling colors that nature displays. But, this is our time of year! Our summers are hot, humid, and sticky. Our falls and winters blend into each other, and although we don’t see nature at its most glorious, we also don’t need to rake leaves or shovel snow/sludge. So, I can’t really complain about our other seasons…. although, if you asked my husband… he would assure you that I CAN (and DO!) complain.
Wow! There sure are a lot of detectives of “a certain age” out there in the world of mystery books! When I started going through all of my authors and trying to categorize them, I divided them into more obvious themes… I had sleuths who cooked and cleaned, amateur detectives who gardened and golfed, accounting sleuths, amateur detectives who skated and golfed, sleuths who owned book stores or worked at libraries, ETC. However, I think that the “senior” sleuth was the most ambiguous of all of the categories. When I was in my twenties, I probably would have said that 60s would be considered senior. Now, however, I don’t think of 60s as anywhere near “retirement time.” (Note that I don’t say just “retirement”…. since I am truly looking forward to the day when my husband can retire and we can really start living… it up, I mean! Travelling during the time when other people are locked into the school schedules, taking off when we feel like it, going where we want to go, ETC… and that’s a BIG “ETC” of all the things that are available once you retire from work… but by no means from life! (Enough philosophizing for the day!)
What better way to begin this list than by listing Anne George’s Southern Sisters Cozy Mystery Series! Here is the second part of the Senior Sleuth Mystery Theme…
Senior Sleuths… hmm… Just how old does a senior sleuth have to be? Does that mean that the sleuth has to be ten years my senior, or my mother’s senior? As someone who not yet qualifies for the House of Pancakes’ senior discount, but who has a lot of friends who do, I can’t quite decide what the age should be. So, I am just going to leave it to the cozy mystery site readers to decide if the following series qualify as senior sleuths or not. It’s all in the eye of the beholder…