The Ruth Galloway Mystery series is one of the best, most endearing and fascinating mystery series I have ever read. The series follows Ruth who is a forensic archaeologist Professor at a university in Norfolk UK. She lives by the sea next to marsh lands in a lonely cottage and though that sounds grey and dull it is a homely and anchoring setting. Ruth’s character is brilliant and thoughtful with a trenchant POV and her vulnerabilities are common ones that many women can instantly relate to. Her friends are mostly quirky individualists or academics or police (long story that) and not stock supporting characters, their stories are part of the series too. What makes the series so satisfying is it builds on the preceding novels while introducing new characters in the latest book while exploring prior characters back stories, who grow and change and tie both into the current action which keeps the series fresh and interesting. Her writing style is a blend of realism and whimsy and grounded observations together with haunting moody mysticism. Elly Griffiths is a master of building suspense slowly and steadily and alternating it with simultaneous situations occurring alongside each other which form a shifting cumulative narrative picture. It is a well-loved series for me because the characters create an emotional pull which I find is rare in a mystery.
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Three of my favorite cozy writers serve up a St. Patrick’s Day themed trio of mysteries set in coastal Maine and the result is a dark but slightly sweet brew with a kick, just like Irish Coffee. Though I find holiday themed trilogies vary in quality this one delivered suspense, entertainment and solid plots without being farfetched or tired.
This mystery is set in a Victorian London swathed in smoggy fog with omnibuses pulled by horses, railways clattering by, steamboats on the Thames, smoke filled pubs and posh squares lined with newly built townhouses. The London of an evolving Scotland Yard when ‘case files’ were considered a novel policing technique and women riding bicycles was considered risqué, when men routinely wore top hats and women perched small hats on their heads and wore elaborate dresses with bustles. The heroine is also a novelty a single woman journalist working on Fleet Street for a daily paper. She is struggling to survive after a career setback and is offered a lifeline by a young Scotland Yard inspector who needs her insider knowledge to assist him in solving the scandalous murder of a famous actress, Lizzie Dixie, whom she was friends with. Penny Green agrees to help only if she is re-instated at her old job and she tries to balance her own sorrow with her desire to find justice for her old friend and Annie, her daughter. Penny’s connections in the theater world gain access for her and the inspector to meet with the Drury Lane theater proprietor Sebastian an early supporter of Lizzie and Lizzie’s husband an overbearing successful showman in the style of a P.T. Barnum.
This mystery is fresh and original and invokes the era of victory gardens, rationing, scrap metal drives and the music, fashion, movies and values of WWII 1940’s America. Set in Progress, a prosperous town with its own local newspaper the story is told from the perspective of Irene, acting editor-in-chief replacing her dad who is serving on the Pacific front. Irene was formerly limited to the women’s page but is running the paper following local stories and war news while managing staff and editing the paper. A series of anti-Semitic attacks and vandalism against shop owner and neighbors, is big local news which exposes the divisions between supporters of the war and those sympathetic to the Third Reich. That story overlaps another when her best investigative reporter takes off to follow up on a secret lead and is found dead, days later at the bottom of his cellar stairs. Meanwhile her mother rents a room to a young mysterious NYC singer Katherine who moves to town to work in the local Ironworks factory just re-tooled to produce massive quantities of parts for tanks, airplanes etc.
The seaside town of Whitby, overlooked by the ruisn of a famous medieval Abbey high on a cliff, is the setting for this new series featuring Liz, a widowed early retiree who moves to Whitby, buys the adjacent Kipper and Gull Cottages to live in and renovate. For company she rescues Nelson an English Bull terrier, and while walking one morning in the church graveyard near the ancient Abbey they find the dead body of the well-known Professor Crowby recently working on curating the Abbey museum collection.
The tart title hints at the importance of color in this 1st entry in a new series featuring a bright, enterprising interior decorator Hadley who is in town for a job interview and planning to stay at her aunt’s but instead is talked into house-sitting, pet sitting and an outdoor decorating project for a new client Kent who is leaving town for business but when he returns is throwing a surprise party for his fiancée and wants the outdoor area to be completely outfitted and decorated as part of the surprise. Hadley is thrilled and determined to get everything accomplished in time and is immersed in finding the perfect colors, decorative accents and furniture to style the pool and patio area when she suddenly finds herself trying to figure out what happened to her client’s fiancée who mysteriously disappears the night she unexpectedly arrives back in town.
This holiday cozy is a seasonal and suspenseful mystery spiced with some Hollywood glamour and drama set in the seaside town of Santa Sofia. It’s the 7th in the Bread Bakery series and features Ivy Culpepper who works at the tourist town’s famous bread bakery. The bakery is hired by Eliza Fox a young Hollywood star, to cater a glitzy Victorian themed Christmas party and Ivy is invited to discretely photograph the festivities. The party ends suddenly when the body of notorious tabloid reporter is discovered dead on the seaside rocky shore plunged from the backyard cliff.
This series is just the ticket for armchair travelers who enjoy traditional mysteries, the amateur detective, Lana, is a former investigative journalist, blacklisted after an expose turned in a career ending disaster who re-invents herself as a tour guide for Wanderlust Tours. She enjoys the travel, the people and the perks but things don’t always follow the itinerary. In this Mother and Daughter themed Mother’s Day tour to Amsterdam the first surprise is when Lana’s estranged mother joins the tour and events go downhill from there.
This is a mystery and a second chances story set in early 1960s rural England and tells the story of an ordinary middle aged single woman who buys a dilapidated cottage, Sixpenny Holding, hoping to finally begin living life on her terms. She dreams of writing romantic novels of suspense and this ambition is complicated when her widowed brother’s daughter’s caregiver, her aunt, dies suddenly and Marian finds herself raising an opinionated 5-year-old. Both are initially wary of each other but slowly things improve and a cousin, a withdrawn 11-year-old, temporarily joins the tiny household together with a kitten. It sounds too sweet but it’s not, mostly because Marian is a combination of down to earth and whimsical that is in tune with the ramshackle ancient cottage.
This is a new series that combines two no fail cozy settings, a tea room with its fragarent brews, yummy scones, sandwiches and pastries and a Cape Cod sea side setting. To this recipe add zest with a testy, sharp tongued grandmother Rose; humor with a slightly wacky exuberant wanna be novelist friend Bernie and ground it with the steady workaholic granddaugher Lily who owns and cooks for the tea room conveniently located in a stone cottage on the adjacent grounds of her grandmother’s roomy Victorian B&B. To spice things up add a hunky English gardener and a mysterious dark haired son of the nearly bankrupt neighbor who is trying to sell his house to a developer with a very iffy reputation.