My Current Favorite Cozy Mystery Series

I love a good cozy mystery!  This year I've been lucky enough to try a lot of new to me series and have found so many that I really enjoy.  Here are a few I've been loving!

1.  Sophie Kimball Mysteries by J.C. Eaton - This series has a PI firm, crazy relatives, quick pacing, and just super fun mysteries!  The very first mystery involved a cursed book and things have only gotten better from there!

2.  Tourist Trap Mysteries by Lynn Cahoon - This is not a new favorite but it is a consistent favorite.  I like every book more than the last and I love checking up on the characters.

3.  Bakeshop Mysteries by Ellie Alexander - This is similar to the above series.  I've been reading it since the beginning and always enjoy it.  This is a series never ever to be read on an empty stomach.  The food descriptions are killer though they never get in the way of the actual killing.

4.  Cat in the Stacks Mysteries by Miranda James - This series has been around for ages but I'm a recent convert.  It has an almost gentle style to it.  I love having a librarian as the main character and a cat as a side kick.  And this Maine Coon cat is the side kick to end all side kicks.

5.  Auction Block Mysteries by Lorretta Ross - This series is definitely a cozy but it has a somewhat different feel than the rest I've mentioned.  Wren and Death (pronounced Deeth from Dorothy L. Sayers Wimsey mysteries) are such a great team.  I love Death's complicated back story and the mysteries that always have a touch of history.

6.   Kat Holloway Mysteries by Jennifer Ashley - This is historical mystery series all about a cook in a grand house.  There's some upstairs/downstairs back and forth and lots of mystery solving to be had.  I find the cooking in the 19th century talk almost as interesting as catching the killer!

7.  Blue Ridge Library Mysteries by Victoria Gilbert - This series is 2 books in and so far I'm loving it!  It has a librarian main character which I love and a professional ballet dancer/choreographer as a love interest which is fascinating.  This is another one where the mystery seems to have a little history mixed in and there is nothing I love better than a sleuth who is doing research!

8.  The Haunted Library Mysteries by Allison Brook - I mean how can this not be a favorite with the title of the series?  Library Mysteries and Haunted Mysteries are two of my favorite things and this has both!  Plus, a likable main character and a really solid mystery.

9.  The Country Club Murders by Julie Mulhern - This series has been a favorite for awhile and it really doesn't disappoint.  I love Ellison and her ability to tumble into mysteries.  Mulhern's clothing descriptions are glorious and the mystery keeps me guessing till the last page.

10. Liz Talbot Mysteries by Susan M. Boyer - This is another long time favorite and a series that I wish more people read.  I love a cozy that involves a PI and I love when the setting (Charleston in this case) is so vivid it almost becomes a character.  I'm always excited when I see a new book is coming out and I can only wish Boyer would write faster!

Do you read cozy mysteries?  Who are some of your favorites that I should try?

A Dark and Twisting Path - Cozy Mystery Review

Goodreads:  A Dark and Twisting Path (Writer's Apprentice #3) by Julia Buckley

Rating:  Good

Source: Publisher

Description: Lena's best friend, Allison, is in a panic. On a walk in the woods by her home, Allison discovers the body of her mail carrier, an argumentative man who recently had a falling out with Allison's husband. Lena quickly realizes that Allison has nothing to worry about as the murder weapon points to a different suspect altogether: Lena's embattled boyfriend, Sam West.

Sam was cleared of his wife's murder when she was found alive, and now someone is trying to make him look guilty again. Surveillance video of a break-in at his house shows a shadowy figure trying to incriminate him by stealing the weapon from his desk. Lena and Camilla work on a suspect list, but a threatening note and a violent intrusion at Graham House prove that the devious killer has decided to write them into the plot.

Genre: Mystery - Cozy

Why I Picked This Book:  I've been wanting to read this series since the first book came out so I couldn't resist this one.  Plus I love that there are dogs on the cover as well as the cat.

My Impression:  Usually I find that you can jump in anywhere in a cozy mystery - especially with the early books.  This isn't really the case here.  There are some seriously complicated relationships and drama here that while I wasn't confused I think I would have been more invested in caring about it all if I had started from the beginning.

That said I did enjoy this.  I loved all the bits about writing and the relationship between Camilla and Lena.  The mystery was intriguing and there is a major plot that is continuing from the previous books that was also interesting.  I really was fairly clueless about the whos and whys until the end.  Every time I'd think I'd get it figured out I'd start to question myself or a new detail would be added that would throw me off and keep me wondering.

The pacing was well done though at times the dialogue could feel a bit awkward and stilted.  As well, Lena suffers a bit from being too perfect.  Everyone loves her and admires her and despite being in the most baggage filled relationship I've ever seen everything feels a little easy for her.  This could get a bit eye-rolly at times but not so bad that it took over the book.

I enjoyed this book though I think I would have enjoyed it a bit more if I'd started from the beginning.   Buckley's voice feels very unique and I did love the community she's built in this series.  As well the mystery was solid and not too easy to solve.  If you love a little writer's workshop mixed in with your murder try this series - just start with the beginning.  

Would I Read More of this Series/Author?  I would and I'm looking forward to going back to the beginning.

Would I Recommend this Book?  If you're a cozy lover I'd recommend this series though I'd definitely recommend starting at the beginning.  Luckily this is only book 3 so it won't add too many new books to your TBR!

This Week in Reading - August 12

It's Sunday Post time!  This is hosted by the awesome Caffeinated Book Reviewer and gives us all a chance to recap our week.

What I Got:

A Vintage Death by Mary Ellen Hughes - This is the 2nd in the Keepsake Cove series that revolves around a woman who inherited a music box store.  I loved the 1st book and was so excited when I was approved for this one a few months ago BUT when I went to download it the Archive Date was put in wrong and it was already archived.  Luckily it was fixed just a couple days ago and I was able to get my copy.  (NetGalley)

The Christmas Sisters by Sarah Morgan - Sarah Morgan can be a bit hit or miss for me but this one involves sisters and spending Christmas in the Scottish Highlands.  Plus, the last book I read by her was a hit so I'm looking forward to this.  (Blog Tour)

Past Due for Murder by Victoria Gilbert - This Blue Ridge Library series is one of my favorites so I couldn't pass on this one - plus it doesn't come out until 2019 so it doesn't count.  (NetGalley)

Mrs. Jeffries and the Three Wise Women by Emily Brightwell - This is an insanely long running series that I've seen around for ages but somehow never read so I couldn't resist this one.  (Publisher)

Currently:

Reading:  After Many Years by L.M. Montgomery and Lighthouse Beach by Shelley Noble

Listening:  I just finished up Because of Miss Bridgerton by Julia Quinn and am next up on the hold list for my next one.

Watching:  World of Dance on NBC.  I like the judges and everyone is really good and they're all just nice to each other.  Not Great British Bake-Off nice but still nice.  

Off the Blog:

This has been a rough week.  Last weekend when we dropped off our 13 year old dog Spots at the vet to be boarded while we were on vacation.  She seemed fine.  We had noticed she seemed a little slower but we kind of chalked it up to age.  She had gone a day or so without eating but that was because J had bought the wrong food and she was always the pickiest of eaters and she was eating treats so we figured everything was okay.  Except it wasn't.  It turned out she was in kidney failure.  She spent a few extra days at the vet getting fluids and everyone thought she was doing better - not healed but maybe at a sustainable level.  Except she wasn't.  And we had to say goodbye to her last weekend.  

We got her from a local shelter when she was a little puppy and no one could ever agree what all breeds she was.  She loved the vet and treats and walks and when the UPS guy dropped off a package she barked like she wasn't the toughest dog on the planet.  And even though she was 13 she always bounced and was always happy to be where we were.   We really thought we had longer so it's been a bit of a shock though I don't know it'd be any easier if we had time.  It's been a sad time around here and it's just strangely quiet - especially when the doorbell rings.  

On the Blog:

What Happened:

Monday:  Set the Night on Fire - Contemporary Romance Review
Tuesday:  My Ten Childhood Favorites 
Wednesday:  Four Funerals and Maybe a Wedding - Cozy Mystery Review
Thursday:  Books from the Backlog - The Bones of Paris
Friday:  Friday Linkups - Death in the Stacks
Saturday:  Beautiful Exiles - Historical Fiction Review

What's Coming Up:

Monday:  A Dark and Twisting Path - Cozy Mystery Review
Tuesday:  My Ten Favorite Cozy Mystery Authors
Wednesday: Death in the Stack - Cozy Mystery Review
Thursday:  Books from the Backlog
Friday:  Friday Linkups with Current Book
Saturday:  TBD

Happy reading!

Beautiful Exile - Historical Fiction Review

Goodreads:  Beautiful Exiles by Meg Waite Clayton

Rating: Very Good

Source: Publisher

Description: Key West, 1936. Headstrong, accomplished journalist Martha Gellhorn is confident with words but less so with men when she meets disheveled literary titan Ernest Hemingway in a dive bar. Their friendship—forged over writing, talk, and family dinners—flourishes into something undeniable in Madrid while they’re covering the Spanish Civil War.

Martha reveres him. The very married Hemingway is taken with Martha—her beauty, her ambition, and her fearless spirit. And as Hemingway tells her, the most powerful love stories are always set against the fury of war. The risks are so much greater. They’re made for each other.

With their romance unfolding as they travel the globe, Martha establishes herself as one of the world’s foremost war correspondents, and Hemingway begins the novel that will win him the Nobel Prize for Literature. Beautiful Exiles is a stirring story of lovers and rivals, of the breathless attraction to power and fame, and of one woman—ahead of her time—claiming her own identity from the wreckage of love.

Genre: Fiction - Historical

Why I Picked This Book:  I love the time period and the setting and pretty much just everything about the blurb!

My Impression:  Oh this book!  This was the first book I'd read by Meg Waite Clayton and it definitely won't be the last.  It was just so good and so readable and so different and I thoroughly enjoyed it.  Historical fiction can be a bit tricky.  Sometimes if they stick too closely to the truth it becomes dry and slow paced but on the other had it can go the other way where it feels like the time and place is just window dressing and the story really could take place at anytime.  Clayton walks this line brilliantly.  The book never bogged down or became over detailed but at the same time when the chapter heading says Spain in 1937 it IS Spain in 1937.

Coming into this I knew a decent amount Ernest Hemingway and nothing at all about Martha Gellhorn.  I've always been fascinated by Hemingway.  He's not likable and his demons are so well developed they have their own baggage but he's interesting with blinding moments of brilliance and stunning selfishness.  I don't know that I really learned anything new about him here but it really brought alive what I've always thought about him.  Martha was the character I really enjoyed getting to know.  Prior to this I could only have said that her name was vaguely familiar but what an injustice that is to her!  She's brilliant and ambitious and shockingly daring but with enough insecurities to make her relatable.  Would I want to go to lunch with her?  Not really.  She can be abrasive and single minded and her patience for people who can't further her career or her goal can be minimal.  However, she's so unbelievably brilliant and fearless and the situations she charged into are so groundbreaking that in my mind she surpassed Hemingway on the list of people I find fascinating.

These aren't easy people and the events that are going around them aren't easy either yet it never felt overdone and reading it was never difficult.  It made me want to read more from Meg Waite Clayton as well as more about Martha Gelhorn, the Spanish Civil War and pretty much everything that gets mentioned in the book.    This is both incredibly informative and thoroughly entertaining and I so enjoyed getting to know Ernest and Martha even when I didn't always like them.

Would I Read More of this Series/Author?  Absolutely!  I'm already looking forward to reading her next book.  

Would I Recommend this Book?  Definitely!  Especially if you enjoy historical fiction.  

Friday LInkups - Death in the Stacks

It's Friday linkup time!  I'm linking up with the Book Blogger Hop hosted by Coffee Addicted Writer, Book Beginnings of Fridays hosted by Rose City Reader, and the Friday 56 hosted by Freda's Voice

This Week's Book Blogger Hop Question:

Can you say this about yourself?  Nothing makes me happier than sitting down with a good book.

My Answer:

I can definitely say that sitting down with a good book is one of my absolute favorite things - especially when it's one of those magic books that hooks me and really pulls me in.  However, I'm not sure that I'd say it's the very best of things but it's definitely in the top 5.

This week's book is a new book in one of my favorite series.  I love cozy mysteries and I love libraries so a cozy mystery set in a library is pretty fantastic.  Of course I can't pass up Death in the Stacks by Jenn McKinlay.  I especially love that there's a dog instead of the usual cat on the cover!

The Beginning:

September in New England was about as perfect as a season as there was on earth.

My Thoughts:

September in Alabama is still freakishly hot and humid so now I'm thinking of heading up to New England in a month!

The 56:  

"I'm the president of the library board.  Me.  I am the one who decides who is hired and who is fired and how things -".

Pop!  The sound cut out on Olive's microphone.

My Thoughts:
Well Olive sounds like a delight to work with/for.  Normally if people start throwing around just how important they are bad things are going to happen!

So what do you think?  Keep reading?

Books from the Backlog - The Bones of Paris

Today I'm linking up with Carole from Carole's Random Life of Books for Books from the Backlog.  I really enjoy the chance to feature a book that's been hiding in the piles of books for far too long!  Today's book is The Bones of Paris by Laurie R. King. 

Blurb:  Paris, France: September 1929. For Harris Stuyvesant, the assignment is a private investigator’s dream—he’s getting paid to troll the cafés and bars of Montparnasse, looking for a pretty young woman. The American agent has a healthy appreciation for la vie de bohème, despite having worked for years at the U.S. Bureau of Investigation. The missing person in question is Philippa Crosby, a twenty-two year old from Boston who has been living in Paris, modeling and acting. Her family became alarmed when she stopped all communications, and Stuyvesant agreed to track her down. He wholly expects to find her in the arms of some up-and-coming artist, perhaps experimenting with the decadent lifestyle that is suddenly available on every rue and boulevard.

As Stuyvesant follows Philippa’s trail through the expatriate community of artists and writers, he finds that she is known to many of its famous—and infamous—inhabitants, from Shakespeare and Company’s Sylvia Beach to Ernest Hemingway to the Surrealist photographer Man Ray. But when the evidence leads Stuyvesant to the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol in Montmartre, his investigation takes a sharp, disturbing turn. At the Grand-Guignol, murder, insanity, and sexual perversion are all staged to shocking, brutal effect: depravity as art, savage human nature on stage.

Soon it becomes clear that one missing girl is a drop in the bucket. Here, amid the glittering lights of the cabarets, hides a monster whose artistic coup de grâce is to be rendered in blood. And Stuyvesant will have to descend into the darkest depths of perversion to find a killer . . . sifting through The Bones of Paris. 

Why It Needs to Come Off the Shelf:  I love this author and I love the setting and just the whole sound of the book.  It is the 2nd in a series but I'm hoping that won't be a problem!

Four Funerals and Maybe a a Wedding - Cozy Mystery Review

Goodreads:Four Funerals and Maybe a Wedding (Royal Spyness #12) by Rhys Bowen

Rating: Very Good

Source: Publisher

Description:  Georgie is finally able to plan for her wedding in the summer. It is going to be a summer of weddings: her mother is marrying Max, her German beau; Georgie's grandfather is marrying his next door neighbor, Mrs. Huggins; and Darcy's father is getting up the courage to ask the princess to marry him. Georgie is staying at the princess's London house when she receives a letter from one of her mother's former husbands, Sir Hubert Anstruther. Georgie is now his sole heir, and he's offering her the use of his lovely country house. He suggests she move in right away to keep an eye on the place because all might not be well since his butler died.

Georgie talks this through with her husband-to-be, Darcy, who is off to Europe again, this time to Berlin. They decide that she will take Sir Hubert up on his offer. However, when Georgie arrives, it becomes clear that she is definitely not wanted in the house. Strange things are happening, including a lively ghost and a less than friendly reception from the new butler. When a body shows up, Georgie realizes that Sir Hubert's invitation may not have been entirely altruistic and begins to wonder if she'll even make it to her wedding day.

Genre: Mystery - Cozy

Why I Picked This Book:  I've really enjoyed this series even though I've missed a few in the middle and I'm excited to see if Darcy and Georgie actually get married.

My Impression: So I always enjoy the Royal Spyness books.  I can always depend on them to be fun and light with a great 1930s and touches of royalty.  However, for some reason this one really grabbed me and I was all in from page one!  I think Georgie just feels a little bit more grown up and a little bit more comfortable in her own skin even when she's having a bit of a (very justified) meltdown.  The mystery took a little while to get to but I was so caught up in the wedding planning and all the other life arranging that Georgie is in the middle of figuring out that I didn't even notice!

But the mystery - it was such a good one!  I love a good country house upstairs/downstairs mystery and this had that in spades with hijinks and all kids of craziness.  It had kind of an Agatha Christie feel but with a bit more humor.  I found the pacing to be super fast without being rushed and this one was one of those books I found myself sneaking off to read "just a page or two".

This was such a quick read with all the fun I've come to expect from this series but with a mystery that surpassed my expectations. 

Would I Read More of this Series/Author?  Absolutely!  I really enjoyed this one which makes me excited for the next book!

Would I Recommend this Book?  I would though this is one of those series that might be better to start with an earlier book.  I felt like this one was better than earlier books but there are a lot of characters with complicated relationships and that could get confusing if you're new to the series.