After twenty years in the US Army as a driver and a combat medic, Megan Malone is settling into the quiet life as a driver for a luxury car service in Dublin, Ireland. When a client unexpectedly drops dead just outside her car, her own empathy for the deceased’s husband means she can’t just walk away, and she’s drawn into the police investigation by insatiable curiosity. Dublin’s a fascinating setting for a cozy mystery series, with its old-world architecture and atmosphere c

The Multiverse Investigations Unit - fighting crime across the Multiverse Alex Strand is finding her way as the newest and most ginger member of the University of Berkeley Physics Faculty. But when the murder of reclusive internet billionaire Claire Pope proves insoluble, she’s recruited to the top-secret Multiverse Investigations Unit. Hidden in the parking lot of San Francisco Police HQ, the unit investigates murders by sending officers to parallel universes in which the vi

When she inherits a pet shop and a house from her aunt at right about the same time a TV series she had a long-running role in is cancelled, Shell McMillan decides to throw in her acting career and settle into a quiet life following in her aunt’s footsteps. No sooner does she arrive in Fox Hollow, Connecticut, though, than she’s getting into a confrontation over a museum turning down the opportunity to display some memorabilia her aunt owned, and then the woman she argued wit

Heading home with her tail between her legs after the final collapse of an abusive marriage, Marygene Brown just wants to settle back into partnership with her sister Jena Lynn, running the family diner on Peach Cove Island. The appearance of her mother’s ghost warning of an imminent murder puts paid to any thought of peace and quiet, though, and soon Marygene is up to her neck in trying to solve the mystery… and save her own neck. This is a little bit grittier than your aver

I was about five pages into Game of Bones when I started doing the slow-blink “what the heck am I reading”. We meet the heroine, Sarah Booth Delaney, when she’s riding her horse around her family’s ancestral Southern plantation estate and mourning the fact that she’s had to lease most of its ‘vast acres’ to a local farmer. So when she’s having vague money worries later on in the book, it really doesn’t ring true; what about the lease income from those ‘vast acres’?. And yes,

The Scent of Murder is the first in a new series about Jazz Ramsey, a volunteer cadaver dog handler. Working with Luther, a cadaver dog in training, Jazz is shocked to stumble across a body in the abandoned building they’re using as a practice ground - and doubly so when she realizes she knows the victim. There’s a lot going on in Jazz’s personal life which makes her unwilling to walk away from this crime without getting some answers. In the last couple of years, she broke up

Brother and sister, Ophelia and Brandon are a pair of black cats who are dumped by the roadside after the tragic death of their owner, a wealthy old lady. Ophelia is rescued by Ruby, a Tarot reader standing in for her sister (a Santeria priestess) at her shop. With the assistance of Ruby’s friendly pitbull Zuki, and a fish named Philomena, Ophelia and Brandon are reunited, but their adventures are only just beginning as it comes to light that their former owner may have been

Madame Eleanor Wilde is a con artist, and like all the best con artists, she knows the best way to con someone is to show them exactly what they expect to see. She’s a very successful medium and ghost exorcist, and when she’s hired to go to England by an intriguing aristocrat who knows exactly what she is and wants to hire her to con his mother, she can’t quite resist the challenge. Nothing is quite as it seems at the Hartford Estate, though. And when a real dead body turns u

Unbridled Murder is the third in Leigh Hearon’s Carson Stables cozy murder mystery series. Now, I love horses and I love thrillers, so this kind of cozy mystery should be right up my alley - more than the endless cat and dog-themed ones which seem to be the majority of cozies. The problem is, I think, that I’ve come at this one without reading the earlier books in the series, which would probably have established the personality of Annie, the protagonist, rather better. As it

Not According To Flan is the first book in the Cozy Mystery genre I’ve read, and I have to say I was pretty underwhelmed. The heroine, Jane, is supposedly an intelligent paralegal who appears at the same time to be a complete airhead. Case in point; on realising that someone has definitely been inside her house, since some of her things have been rearranged, she takes a phone call from a friend and immediately changes focus to thinking about her dinner party without thinking