Tamara Berry: By the Book Mystery Series

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.