American/Cozy

“Mr. Cavarelli slithered in at ten o’clock. He was one of the elegant reptiles from the New York office… Even his suit was a lizardlike greenish brown. He wore alligator shoes, which Helen thought was no way to treat a relative.”

Mysteries involve a certain amount of fantasy. In mysteries written by men, the fantasy element often involves the male character and any female: the women all want to jump his bones. In mysteries written by women, the fantasy is even more basic: food. In Sue Grafton’s books not only does Kinsey Milhone live unencumbered by relatives in an adorable apartment that looks like a ship’s cabin, she can eat fried baloney sandwiches grilled with “a knuckle of butter.” In Elaine Viets’ dandy Dead End Job series, her irrepressible heroine, Helen Hawthorne, lives on “pillowy white bread,” plates of brownies, and endless salt and vinegar potato chips. She also has an ultra cool apartment in a very 50’s Florida building, complete with groovy landlady (Margery, who wears only purple), and furnished with 50’s furniture. The barcalounger in Helen’s apartment is my favorite. read more

This is really one of the loveliest cozy series around.  Fiffer’s prose sparkles, and she knows how to tell a story.  All her characters are wonderfully real people, very much like people you might actually know yourself.  Fiffer’s main character, Jane Wheel, is uncharacteristically zen in this outing, which I found refreshing.

Jane is antiques picker and a fledgling private eye, and it’s her love of “stuff” that has propelled the series.  Much like Fiffer herself who collects Bakelite, buttons, pottery and vintage potholders among other items, Wheel’s home and garage are packed to the rafters with her stuff. read more

Julia Kramer’s skill set is extremely varied:  she’s funny, she writes suspenseful books, she tells you a bit about the way TV news works, and her books are an enjoyable breeze to read.  Why that is is a mystery, as she tends to actually cover some very dark territory in her novels, and they’ve gotten a tad darker lately.

She’s also, since her first novel, sharpened her skills as a straight up mystery writer.  She’s gotten terrific at twists and clues, and at setting up a story that gives the reader a fair chance at figuring things out.  In this novel, set partially in Minnesota’s Amish community, she takes two disparate worlds, the “English” and the Amish, and sort of pits them reluctantly against each other. The book opens with a terrific scene of a farm boy falling into a sinkhole and finding he’s there with a dead body.  While the farm boy isn’t the point, the dead body is the point, this wonderful scene setter grabs your attention and gets you completely invested in the story Kramer wants to tell. read more

This is the 27^th Gregor Demarkian novel, making Jane Haddam one of the steadiest performers around.  Each year she publishes a polished, thoughtful novel, with one of the more endearing of contemporary detectives.  While she surrounds Gregor with the Philadelphia and specifically Armenian neighborhood where he grew up and still lives, my favorite part is when Gregor is off cracking the case.

Long ago in the first novel (Not a Creature was Stirring, 1990), Gregor met his now wife, Bennis, a member of the Philadelphia mainline.  In that novel I was frustrated to discover that Gregor was a widower, and that Haddam was not going to give her readers much more detail than that.  However the meeting of the intelligent Bennis and the practical Gregor, over the killing of a member of her family, remains one of the great mystery couple match ups. read more

Buttons?  What kind of interesting or even passable novel could be written about buttons?  Quite an entertaining one, as it turns out, by old pro Kylie Logan, who readers may also know as Casey Daniels or Miranda Bliss.  The premise of this cozy is that the central character is the owner of a brand spanking new shop specializing in all kinds of antique and collectible buttons.

Set in Chicago, the brisk pace of the story seems to fit the Windy City quite well, as Logan opens her story with a gigantic bang: when Josie Giancola goes in to open her new button shop, she’s assaulted by two large, ski mask wearing men, who throw her to the ground and sprint away after having ravaged her shop.  As she’s left t regard the wreckage, picking up buttons she’d meticulously catalogued , she’s sure the men are tied to her ex with a gambling problem. read more

Denise Swanson is a “name” in the cozy universe, having written fourteen books in her popular Scumble River series, and the time has come for her to branch out.  Sensibly, she’s created an entirely different character from her down to earth Skye Denison, school psychologist in Scumble River, Illinois, but she’s stuck to the small town template where she obviously feels comfortable and at home.

Her new series character, Devereaux Sinclair (yes, she shares Denise’s initials) owns a small shop in Shadow Bend, Missouri, her home town.  She had a fancy city job which drove her nuts and has come back to take over the town soda fountain, to which she’s added a gift basket side business.  I think Ms. Swanson must have the heart of a born retailer, because her shop sounds like the perfect retail combination for almost any town. read more

Jacobus…was dumbfounded by such a compelling, polished personal performance, unaware of anything else but the music – his own definition of a great performance. – from Devil’s Trill

Devil’s Trill is one of the more traditional mysteries I’ve read in a long while, and I’ve recently re-read books by Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, and Patricia Moyes. It’s also a breath of fresh air with a truly interesting main character and a fantastically interesting setting. Daniel Jacobus is an old, blind, crotchety (he gives new meaning to the word “codger”) violin teacher, and it’s also clear from the novel that he’s a teacher with a rare gift. Along with his deductive skills – honed from many years as a blind man – his gift to mystery fiction is an insight into the backstage goings-on of the classical music world. read more

The wait is over – Diane Mott Davidson is back, and she seems energized by her hiatus. The change in publishers has only brought one difference – the recipes are in the back instead of throughout the book – but really, that just makes them easier to find. Either you like Davidson’s heroine, Goldy Shultz, or you don’t. I love Goldy and her whole family – her dashing policeman husband, Tom; her sometimes sullen but always interesting teenage son, Arch; and her flamboyant best friend Marla, who shares the ultimate bond with Goldy: they have the same ex-husband. The aforementioned ex-husband, John Richard Korman (called by Goldy and Marla at all times the “Jerk”), is present at the kickoff luncheon of the book, which is full of the doctors and Aspen society Goldy knew in her old life as a doctor’s wife. Of course, Goldy is now a caterer, and her ex is freshly out of prison. He beat Goldy up when he was married to her, and finally beat one of his girlfriends so badly it sent him to jail. But he’s back, and as nasty as ever. read more

I’ve long been admirer of Diane Mott Davidson’s Goldy Bear books (I’ve read all of them) and am delighted that she will be stopping by the store this month, and even more delighted that there’s a new book to read. If you are a “Goldy” fan you already know that along with authors like Sue Grafton and Janet Evanovich, Ms. Davidson delivers one of the most reliably entertaining series on the planet, and like the recipes laced throughout the books, one of the more comfortably familiar. Either you are a fan of Goldy, Tom, Arch, Julian and Marla, or you are not, but if you are you are seriously hooked, and have enjoyed the arc of Goldy’s life as she established her business in the first few books and broke away from the clutches of her abusive ex-husband; believably raises her very true to life teenager, Arch; and meets, falls in love with, and marries Tom Shultz, policeman, cook and husband extrodinaire. Like all good women’s detective fiction, these books work because while there’s an element of reality, there’s also a large dose of enjoyable – and perhaps attainable – fantasy. In these books the fantasies involve Goldy’s drinking espresso from morning till night and never having that awful caffeine sick feeling; having a husband who treats her like a goddess (down to running her shower and getting her a soft robe to climb into when she’s done); having a best friend, Marla, who besides being rich is also the ex-wife of Goldy’s ex and hates him just as much as she does; and best of all the fact that Goldy cooks like Julia Child and eats like Roseanne Barr but never seems to gain a pound. For some reason this is completely and totally captivating, and I haven’t regretted reading a word of this series. read more