A Good Start to a New Cozy Mystery Series

After romance, cozy mysteries are my favorite fiction genre to read. Even though I enjoy the more serious police shows on TV, when I read, I prefer a good cozy. This is the first book in a new series by an author I have not read before. This is a culinary mystery, and I always find these to be particularly fun. Luckily, this one was no exception. The murder takes place in a bakery; the man who helped the heroine move into her new bakery space is found dead. They had not gotten along so well during the move, so she is a likely suspect. Luckily, she has a variety of friends who try to help her figure out what actually happened.

I did enjoy the quirky world created by this author. A good cozy needs to be quirky for sure and perhaps even wacky. I think this book fulfilled both requirements. There is a surprisingly large cast of characters in this book, and the heroine has a lot of friends. I will admit this was a little confusing at first, as we are introduced to many characters one after the other. Their speech patterns were not distinct enough to really help characterize them, so sometimes it was a little hard to follow and know who was who. I absolutely adored the older friends of the heroine; we don’t see enough active, older characters in contemporary fiction. The friends actually do have a big role in this novel as they try to help the heroine sort everything out. There were some definite issues with grammar, punctuation, and usage, enough to be distracting. Commas were problematic as were the hyphens needed for compound adjectives. The last may sound a little silly, but if they aren’t used properly, sometimes the meaning of a sentence is not clear, making you have to re-read to get the meaning.

All in all, though, I thought that this was a good start for a new cozy mystery series. At least when I read the next one, I will have a better sense of the large cast of characters, which will be a help. Now, if the author could just get it professionally edited, that would be a big help for me, too!

I’ll Take Some Double-Fudge Rum Pie, Please!

I have read all the books, I think, of the Drunken Pie Cafe cozy mystery series. Sometimes I swear that I enjoy the names of the drunken pies more than the mystery! I wish the author included recipes. Anyway, about this book. I like that the author got to the first dead body rather quickly. I do get frustrated with cozy mysteries that spend too much time on the quirky characters or other world-building, delaying the murder and therefore not allowing much time for twists and turns and red herrings necessary for a mystery plot. This did have an extended scene before the crime was discovered, but it was relatively confined (at a town event) and necessary to set up the murder. This time, one of Izzy’s friends looks like the prime suspect, and her alibi doesn’t look too good and cannot be corroborated. Even Sheriff Mitch doesn’t like having to investigate her as he had considered her a friend as well. This book does have a few red herrings and blind alleys, which I always love in a mystery. I think, though, that the number of characters in Sunshine Springs that we know of needs to be expanded to give us more possibilities for suspects. It felt like the suspect pool was limited in this book. All in all, I still found it to be an enjoyable cozy mystery read.