American/Cozy

This is the book Swanson fans have been waiting for – for fifteen books now, Swanson has resisted matching up her wonderful creation of Skye Dennison with a particular man.  In this one (spoiler alert) Skye and Wally are finally getting ready to walk down the aisle.  If you are a Facebook fan of Swanson or have read all the books, this won’t come as a surprise.  Swanson has always been an interactive author, arriving at her very first signing at our store with her mother in tow and giving the entire audience a personality test.  For this novel, she posted photos of possible wedding gown, shoe, cake and flower choices online. read more

A smooth fit with Berkley’s line of cozy “themed” mysteries, The Azalea Assault features a PR pro from Roanoke, Va. who works with the local garden society. This book hits on a lot of fronts — there’s gardening, there’s a little cooking, and there are three pretty interesting women at the center of the story.

The main character, Camellia Harris, lives with her more free and easy BFF, Annie. While Camellia is more rule oriented and super organized, Annie is more of a free spirit in peasant skirts to Camellia’s Talbot’s slacks, getting things done by the skin of her teeth. They are a well matched pair and their living arrangement — same house, each with her own apartment — suits them perfectly. read more

Julie Hyzy has quickly become one of the big kahunas in the cozy universe, with her delightful and sparkling Olivia Parras White House chef mysteries being more and more eagerly snapped up with each installment. She’s established herself as not only a very capable cozy writer, but she’s also quite good with suspense and plot, sometimes surprisingly good. The ending of her last Olivia novel, Affairs of Steak, had an extremely skillful action sequence – one that sits comfortably alongside anything Robert Crais or Michael Connelly might dish out. read more

It’s a privilege to enter Margaret Maron’s world.  She has created Deborah Knott’s world every bit as much as J.K. Rowling created Harry Potter’s, and the texture of it is practically a living thing.  On every page, Judge Deborah Knott will be doing nothing predictable – she’ll be cooking, working, interacting with her husband or stepson or huge (and I do mean huge) extended family.  In short, she’ll be living her life, and you’re welcome to join in for the duration of the story. read more

Jim Huang’s publishing imprint is re-issuing P.M. Carlson’s enjoyable series featuring Maggie Ryan, which begins with Maggie as a student at a small, upstate New York college.  The college is staging Hamlet and has decided to bring in some “real” New York actors to play the main parts, with the students filling out the rest of the cast and supplying the crew.

Carlson is an “old school” cozy writer – at times, the situations she is writing about aren’t so cozy, and the world she is writing about, while it has a hook (in this case both academia and the theater), what she’s really interested in are  the characters and their relationships to one another.  This series fits nicely next to Sharyn McCrumb’s Elizabeth McPhearson books or Nancy Pickard’s long lived Jenny Cain series.  There are eight books in this series, with Maggie growing from a young student into a woman, but this first one almost embraces her naiveté. read more

I’m not generally a cozy reader, but for some reason I picked this book up and was hooked by the end of the first chapter. Viets’ sense of humor is never cloying, her central character, Helen, is smart, and the premise is wonderful. Helen is a clerk in an ultra fancy boutique in Ft. Lauderdale – a boutique so fancy that customers are buzzed in only at the whim of the manager – she rejects women whom she thinks are too heavy, who have ugly shoes, hair or purses, etc. (I know which side of the door I’d be on). It’s so fancy there are no price tags on the clothes – if you have to ask, you can’t afford the $500 halter top – and the clerks aren’t allowed to sit down. Viets’ description of a typical customer is classic: read more

The fifth book in Viets’ lively Helen Hawthorne series doesn’t disappoint, despite Viets’ taking on another potentially boring job (pet store clerk) and somehow milking it for satire and interest despite the odds. This time around, Helen isn’t working in a boring chain pet store but in one of those fancy pet boutiques that sell cute little coats, booties and fancy treats for super spoiled dogs. Catering to the ultra rich of Ft. Lauderdale, Helen finds herself schlepping bags of dog food out to waiting BMWs and driving to client’s homes to pick up their pooches for a session with the fabulous groomer at the Pampered Pet Boutique, Jonathan. Helen, for the uninitiated, works off the books for cash so her ex-husband, whom she caught with her best friend, can’t track her down and take half her assets away (he wants alimony from her). So Helen lives in a picturesque apartment building populated with all kinds of interesting eccentrics, including her boyfriend, undercover agent Phil, who handily lives next door but who is frequently out of town on assignment. This is a rich background for all the stories, as the characters at the apartment building stay the same (except for the rotating bunch of criminals in a certain apartment), while Helen’s different jobs provide a whole new slew of characters in every novel. It’s a neat and useful premise. read more

I’ve said this about every Elaine Viets book, I think – with each installment, I am always sure (I don’t know why) that it will actually be impossible for Ms. Viets to maintain the funny yet intelligent and somehow compulsively readable book she’s supplied with each outing. As usual, and happily, I was again wrong. Reading about the intrepid Helen Hawthorne’s job as a hotel maid was just as compelling as her telemarketer, bridal salesperson, retail clerk and fancy pet store jobs, and what’s more, Viets finally resolves a huge issue in this book – she deals with Helen’s ex-husband who is on the prowl and who seems to have at last tracked her down. read more

The hapless Helen Hawthorne is at it again – she’s working another dead end job, after telemarketing didn’t work out for her. This time she’s in a fancy bridal boutique working as an underpaid salesperson serving an assortment of dysfunctional brides and their mothers, as well as an all too street smart boss, Millicent. The bridezilla to take the cake is actually a mother of the bride – the glamorous, snaky Kiki, who drags her plain Jane daughter into Millicent’s to buy her the wedding dress of Kiki’s dreams, that will also – if all goes well – cost her ex-husband an arm and a leg. Kiki gets everything she wants; her daughter, Desiree, gets to wear the dress of her choice at the reception only. The dress her mother chooses for her to wear at the ceremony is hopelessly unflattering – as Desiree puts it, she looks like “a homely Hapsburg Princess.” Of course, as any astute mystery reader will guess, Kiki isn’t long for this world, but as with every other novel in this delightful series, that’s almost beside the point. read more

Sharon Fiffer has become one of the more reliable, and enjoyable, cozy writers around.  For one thing, her actual prose is lovely, which is always a pleasure.  For another, she has a sturdy cast of characters that flesh out her stories and give them lots of depth.  Like my other favorite in this series, Scary Stuff, Backstage Stuff finds antiques picker/private eye (PPI) Jane Wheel back in her childhood home, Kankakee, Illinois.  Part of the reason I enjoy Jane back in Kankakee so much instead of her native Chicago is the presence of her always fascinating mother, Nellie, co-proprietor (with Jane’s dad, natch) of the E-Z Way Inn. read more