The Cozy Mystery List Blog

Well, it’s that time of the month again – time for me to highlight another novel in my long-running series of books recommended by Cozy Mystery readers. Today I’ll be writing about Death in Castle Dark, the first in the A Dinner and a Murder Mystery Series, which is another series written by Julia Buckley. Unfortunately, this is one of those situations where you might not immediately realize this by looking at the cover of the book, as she was writing here as Veronica Bond. Yes, we’re dealing with a long-running frustration of mine, an author with a much-less used pseudonym. I’ve already written two of this author’s series (the Hungarian Tea House Mystery Series and the Writer’s Apprentice Mystery Series) but, since this book was released under another name, many readers might not be aware of the existence of this short series – which would be a real shame, because I definitely enjoyed this outing as well.

Anyway! Enough about my little ‘pet peeve’ regarding pseudonyms.

As the novel begins, actress Nora Blake has just gotten a new job – working at Castle Dark, a murder mystery themed dinner event where customers spend the night enjoying both a good meal and attempt to solve an interesting ‘murder mystery’. The job isn’t ideal – the pay isn’t great, and Wood Glen is a bit more remote from Chicago than Nora would like, but it does come with room and board, which is certainly a strong incentive for a young actress without a steady job like Nora. However, she’s quickly sold on the job, which is certainly heavy on melodrama, but also flexes the cast’s improv skills. The naturally, the cast of the dinner all know each other well, but many of the customers are frequent repeat visitors as well.

Unsurprisingly, this being a Cozy, it doesn’t take long at the new job before something goes terribly wrong – a real murder occurs, as Nora discovers the very actually dead body of one of her actor colleagues during her second performance night. Naturally, despite the victim being generally well-liked, it turns out that there are plenty of people both in the cast and in the nearby town, who might have had reasons to want him gone.

One thing I particularly noted with particular eagerness was that a series of simple diagrams for the Castle Dark floor plans at the beginning of the book, complete with secret passages. For a reader such as myself who puts a high premium on the mystery of a Cozy, this is a really great way for an author to indicate that these sort of details will be important to the story – in other words, a lot of thought probably went into the mystery! As a fan of “classics” of the mystery genre from authors like Doyle and Christie, I really love this sort of thing.

All told, this is a great mystery that really focuses on the ‘mystery’ element. There are definitely plenty of flavor elements – the castle is a great classic sort of setting, the characters are all interesting, as well as discussions about the acting roles. However, it’s really the mystery that takes the star in Death in Castle Dark.