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.
Continue reading “Tea and Treachery by Vicki Delany – A Tea by the Sea Mystery”
This is a traditional mystery series with a modern heroine, Kate Shackleton, who runs a detective agency with her assistant Sykes a retired policeman, and her housekeeper who acts as a sometimes aide/secretary. What sets this series apart to me is that it captures the essence of a time as the modern era clashes and challenges the traditional in post WWI England and typically features some aspect of the new era, in this mystery it’s a pageant for North Riding Brewery queen and the use of branding as a marketing tool.
I love this series, it’s a traditional cozy set in England narrated by a transplanted American, Dorothy Martin, a 60-ish widow happily re-married to a retired English Chief Constable, Alan Nesbitt, who lives in a quintessential English cottage in a cathedral town in southeast England. Dorothy is unabashedly an Anglophile and mixes enthusiasm with sharp humor and sometimes tact. She forges ahead in life but this energy is tempered by common sense and her impulsive, intuitive style and outspokenness are softened by shrewdness and the ability to connect random dots into a cohesive pattern. She is also very funny in her observations and descriptions are effortlessly entertaining. This lady has style and it’s not just her hats!