🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 An utterly charming and mostly unexpected treat, best described as the love child of ‘The Durrells’, ‘Pride and Prejudice’, and an add-your-own-favorite cozy mystery. Set on the idyllic island of Corfu in the year 1898, the story is told by Minnie Harper, a smart and restrained thirty-three year old…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 A lively cozy mystery featuring the colorful cast of characters introduced in the first Meredith Island mystery, “Secrets in the Water”, also reviewed by this reader. The series is set amidst a charming Welsh remote island inhabited by a tight knit community, including Kate Galway, a retired teacher and…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 A charming cozy mystery, the third in a series featuring Miranda Abbott, and the first experienced by this reader. Miranda Abbott is a former TV detective, a sort of everyone’s favorite Jessica Fletcher, who traded in her sophisticated acting chops to star in a blissfully cheesy, but highly popular,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 This charming cozy mystery is clever, engaging and a tweak on the typical murder-in-an-exotic-location trope. With the madcap moodiness, sinister undercurrent, and dreamy gelato-soaked Italian-esque setting of the fabulous (and slyly referenced) “White Lotus”, this story is coupled with main characters who are themselves mystery authors, including (and a…
Second in the Paradise Cafe series, this is another interesting, enjoyable read, with a likable heroine, an evocative setting in Depression-era 1936 Toronto, and not one, but two mysteries to solve. When Charlotte Frayne, PI, is hired to investigate the suspicious suicide of a severely disfigured veteran, she must confront…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 A funny and captivating murder mystery, featuring a quartet of octogenarians who are as charming as they are quick-witted. Companions at the luxurious Coopers Chase Retirement village - Joyce, Elizabeth, Ibrahim and Ron, our main protagonists - enjoy wine, gin and tonics, gossiping, and sunshine as they contemplate life…
🌟🌟🌟 1/2 An interesting premise, - part competitive cozy-baking tv show, cleverly merged with an Agatha-Christie-like murder mystery. Like the characterizations it is based on, this book has a “folksy niceness”, a clean demarcation of the main players, (each with their idiosyncrasies, secrets, and struggles), and a twisty plot to…
🌟🌟🌟🌟1/2 A cozy, crazy tapestry of lives and loves, heartfelt friends, caring onlookers and the others, the-not-so-kind, who are willing to cross the line to make their lives that little bit of better. Based in the Yorkshire town of Thirsk, and told in the the voices of three retired primary-school…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 Mma Precious Ramotswe, Botswana-based owner of the longest established, most reputable and only local detective agency entirely run by ladies, is back in fine form in this latest installment of the always-wonderful #1LadiesDetectiveAgency series. With her gentle goodness, old-school Botswanan morality and “ability to see the whole…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟 An absorbing and chatty Scottish-based mix of Agatha Christie meets Emmerdale, this is the first of the Dr. Cathy Moreland series I have had the pleasure to read - a situation I would like to remedy quickly. Dr. Cathy is an earnest, sincere woman, a somewhat-frazzled GP…