Book picks similar to
A Fatal New Year by J.A. Whiting
mystery
cozy-mystery
ebook
mystery-cozy
Meet Your Baker
Ellie Alexander - 2014
The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is bringing in lots of tourists looking for some crumpets to go with their heroic couplets. But when one of Torte's customers turns up dead, there's much ado about murder...The victim is Nancy Hudson, the festival's newest board member. A modern-day Lady Macbeth, Nancy has given more than a few actors and artists enough reasons to kill her...but still. The silver lining? Jules's high school sweetheart, Thomas, is the investigator on the case. His flirtations are as delicious as ever, and Jules can't help but want to have her cake and eat it too. But will she have her just desserts? Murder might be bad for business, but love is the sweetest treat of all...
Game of Scones
Mary Lee Ashford - 2018
Except this time, the recipe truly is to die for . . . After losing her job as food editor at a glossy magazine, Rosetta Sugarbaker Calloway—aka “Sugar” to friends—isn’t sweet on accepting defeat and crawling back to her gossipy southern hometown. So when she has an opportunity to launch a community cookbook business with blue-ribbon baker Dixie Spicer in peaceful St. Ignatius, Iowa, she jumps at the chance to start over from scratch . . . But as Sugar assembles recipes for the local centennial celebration, it’s not long before she’s up to her oven mitts in explosive threats, too-hot-to-handle scandals, and a dead body belonging to the moody matriarch of the town’s first family. With suspicions running wild, Sugar and Spice must solve the murder before someone innocent takes the heat—and the real culprit gathers enough ingredients to strike again . . . * Includes delicious recipes! *
Murder & Spice and Everything Nice
Caryn Thomas Mitchell - 2017
Baby books in the nursery, entertaining books in the dining room and romance reads in the ladies boudoir. It looked like it would work out great right up until the moment that the leader of a local religious cult turned up dead in the driveway. Soon his wife is dead as well.Through no fault of her own, Ivy feels she has to meddle...uh help, investigate. It's not at all because the lead investigator is her high school crush. It's because her livelihood is at stake. After all, who wants to shop at a bookstore where people keep dying? This is a novella, the perfect length to read in an afternoon in your favorite cozy chair.
Tea & Treachery
Vicki Delany - 2020
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As the proud proprietor and head pastry chef of Tea by the Sea, a traditional English tearoom on the picturesque bluffs of Cape Cod, Lily Roberts has her hands full, often literally. But nothing keeps her busier than steering her sassy grandmother, Rose, away from trouble. Rose operates the grand old Victorian B & B adjacent to Lily’s tea shop . . . for now. An aggressive real estate developer, Jack Ford, is pushing hard to rezone nearby land, with an eye toward building a sprawling golf resort, which would drive Rose and Lily out of business. Tempers are already steaming, but things really get sticky when Ford is found dead at the foot of Rose’s property and the police think she had something to do with his dramatic demise. Lily can’t let her grandmother get burned by a false murder charge. So she starts her own investigation and discovers Ford’s been brewing bad blood all over town, from his jilted lover to his trophy wife to his shady business partners. Now, it’s down to Lily to stir up some clues, sift through the suspects, and uncover the real killer before Rose is left holding the tea bag.
Scraps of Paper
Kathryn Meyer Griffith - 2003
It’s made her sympathetic to the missing and their families.Starting her new life, Abigail moves to small town and buys a fixer-upper house left empty when old Edna Summers died. Once it was also home to Edna’s younger sister, Emily, and her two children, Jenny and Christopher, who, people believe, drove away one night, thirty years ago, and just never came back.But in renovating the house Abigail finds scraps of paper hidden behind baseboards and tucked beneath the porch that hint the three could have been victims of foul play.Then she finds their graves hidden in the woods behind the house and with the help of eccentric townspeople and ex-homicide detective, Frank Lester, she discovers the three were murdered. Then she and Frank try to uncover who killed them and why…but in the process awaken the ire of the murderer. ***
Loose Screw
Rae Davies - 2011
She even lets a cat shove her around.When Lucy trips over the body of a buckskin-clad relics trader, her ex-boss asks her to cover the story. She tries to tell him no, but old habits die hard and soon she finds herself directly in the path of a killer and the exasperating, if attractive, detective in charge.Can Lucy catch a killer or is this the last confrontation for her—period?
The Tycoon Murderer
Maureen Driscoll - 2018
When Josie Matthews buys a Victorian mansion with a notorious past, she hopes to turn it into a successful inn. While she expects all the headaches of renovating an old house, she isn't prepared to be sent back in time to the site of a double-murder which occurred at the mansion in 1929. While the murders were never solved, they were believed to have been committed by Wall Street financier, David Remington, forever known as the Tycoon Murderer. At the height of the Roaring Twenties, David Remington has invited several friends and acquaintances to a house party, including a Chicago bootlegger and his moll, a Broadway playwright and his best friend, a corrupt U.S. Senator and his wife, a handsome silent screen star and a disgruntled federal agent. After a mysterious woman arrives uninvited, guests start dying one-by-one, making everyone wonder who will be next. Determined to solve the murders before being sent back to her own time, Josie investigates the crimes and tries not to be the next victim. But the biggest mystery is whether David Remington was falsely accused or whether he truly is the Tycoon Murderer. THE TYCOON MURDERER is a time-travel romance/cozy mystery with a retro flair. It contains mild violence, humor and a great deal of bootleg booze.
Invisible
Lorena McCourtney - 2004
So when vandals romp through the local cemetery, she takes advantage of her newfound anonymity and its unforeseen advantages as she launches her own unofficial investigation.Despite her oddball humor and unconventional snooping, Ivy soon becomes discouraged by her failure to turn up any solid clues. And after Ivy witnesses something ominous and unexplained, she can't resist putting her investigative powers to work again. Even the authorities' attempts to keep Ivy out of danger and her nosy neighbor's match-making schemes can't slow her down. But will the determination that fuels this persistent, quirky sleuth threaten her very safety?
Chef Maurice and a Spot of Truffle
J.A. Lang - 2015
By this measure, Chef Maurice was very trustworthy indeed.” Take one sleepy Cotswold village, mix in one Poirot-esque murder mystery, add a larger-than-life French chef with an appetite for solving crime, and season with clues and red herrings galore . . . It’s autumn in the Cotswolds, and Chef Maurice is facing a problem of mushrooming proportion. Not only has his wild herb and mushroom supplier, Ollie Meadows, missed his weekly delivery—he’s missing vital signs too, when he turns up dead in the woods near Beakley village. Soon, Chef Maurice is up to his nose in some seriously rotten business—complete with threatening notes, a pignapping, and an extremely well-catered stake-out. Can he solve Ollie’s murder before his home-made investigation brings the killer out for second helpings?
The Good, the Bad, and the Pugly
Celia Kinsey - 2019
If Emma wants to take possession of Little Tombstone's motel, cafe, curio shop and Museum of the Unexplained, then she has to agree to "Love, Honor and Cherish" Earp, her late aunt's ancient and irritable pug. It says so, right there in the will. What Aunt Geraldine's will conveniently omits to mention are the bodies buried underneath the trailer court.
Murder, She Barked
Krista Davis - 2013
But this tourist town smells trouble when a killer goes on the prowl....Holly Miller's life has gone to the dogs. She has no job, her boyfriend's former flame is sniffing around, and a scruffy but loveable Jack Russell Terrier is scattering crumbs all over her borrowed car. Just when she thought things couldn't get worse, a troubling phone call about her grandmother sends her rushing home to the family inn on Wagtail Mountain.The staff—and a frisky Calico kitten named Twinkletoes—adopts Holly and her new dog on arrival. But someone in this friendly town is bad to the bone. One of the employees at the inn has been killed in a hit-and-run accident—which is looking anything but accidental. Now Holly and her furry companions will have to nose out the murderer before someone else gets muzzled.
Coffee & Corpses
Maisy Marple - 2020
This is the first book in The Connie Cafe Mystery Series -- a perfect series for lovers of clean small town mysteries that feature coffee and an amateur sleuth who’s in way over her head.
A Page of Murder
Penny Brooke - 2021
A quaint bookshop. And a murder.Returning to Somerset Harbor, Rue Collier looks after her gran’s bookstore while she’s kicking off her retirement with a dream trip to Paris. As Rue settles in, she reunites with old friends and is excited to start a new chapter in her life.But not long after she rings up her first customer, the town is in an uproar over the murder of a local bakery owner. It doesn’t take long until Rue finds herself smack dab in the middle of a murder investigation that threatens to upend life in her new home.Will Rue unmask the killer before it’s too late? Or will she unwittingly become their next victim?This fun-filled and clean bookshop cozy mystery will have you guessing until the very end.
Clammed Up
Barbara Ross - 2013
But that was before a catered wedding on picturesque Morrow Island turned into a reception for murder. When the best man’s corpse is found hanging from the grand staircase in the Snowden family mansion, Julia must put the chowder pot on the back burner and join the search for the killer. And with suspicion falling on her old crush, Chris Durand, the recipe for saving her business and salvaging her love life might be one and the same.
Glad One: Crazy is a Relative Term
Margaret Lashley - 2017
Two gin and tonics. Three derelict beach-bum friends. Will Val’s fourth stab at starting over add up to a big fat zero?St. Pete Beach attracts weirdos like mosquitoes to a bug zapper. But when thrice-divorced native Val Fremden feels the tug to fly back to her old stomping grounds, she finds everyone and everything she knew squashed under the heels of change. Reluctantly cast into the weirdo world of down-and-outer beach bums, Val’s got nothing to go on but her own dry sense of humor and the life coach advice of a beer-guzzling old lady she meets at the beach. When an old hoarder passes away and leaves an uncertain heir to the throne, Val and her pals stir up a hornet’s nest trying to uncover the truth. Who’ll get stung and who’ll be named queen to the throne? It’s anybody's guess.If you like wacky, deeply flawed characters and laugh-out-loud situations, you’ll love Glad One! It’s the first book in Margaret Lashley’s hilarious Val Fremden Mystery Series.