Category: Cozy

This is one of those books that I sort of liked in spite of itself.  The author commits the trope-y sin of her characters thinking they must solve the murder for themselves; she doesn’t go so far as to infer or state it’s because the police are inept, but falls back on the argument that a character must be saved because the police won’t look at anybody else.  Pu-lease.  Also, the murderer was super obvious from the first clue.

But, the setting is in a bookshop, in Cambridge, I say in a somewhat whinging voice.  And I like the characters; I like the little micro-community of the laneway whose name I can’t remember nor find in the text.  I like that the author goes a slightly different way in terms of the relationship dynamics between the detective and the other characters.  The MI6 character is a bit of a stretch, but whatever.  I loved Puck.

So, I have enough hope that I’d be wiling to read a second one, but not a lot of optimism that the series will be a keeper.

 

The follow up to the first Tannie Maria mystery, Recipes for Love and Murder, this sophomore entry started off with the same lyrical voice and fabulous atmosphere, but a very disjointed plot.

As the synopsis says, the satanic mechanic is a counsellor specialising in PTSD, whom Tannie Maria consults about her past as an abused spouse.  But he doesn’t make an entrance into the story until Chapter 24, page 92. In the meantime, the book starts almost immediately with the murder of a tribal man whose tribe just won a major land case against a diamond mining company and a cattle company.  He’s poisoned right in front of Tannie Maria and her now-boyfriend Henk, the chief detective.  Her experience with food and cooking gives her the ability to spot how he was poisoned and this opens a rift between her and Henk.

This murder has, seemingly, nothing to do with the satanic mechanic, but his reputation as a suspected former satanist makes everybody suspicious, though Tannie Maria finds her group sessions to be the only thing that’s helped her to date, and several incidents, including another murder in the middle of a group session keeps the focus on the titular character.

Everything comes together in the end, but the journey is not, from a writing perspective, a smooth one.  The connections revealed at the end make complete sense, but getting there was a clumsy exercise in plotting.

The romance started off a bit sweet – in a good way – but veered into the eye-rolling with Henk’s manufactured drama.  I realise attractiveness is entirely subjective, but the author seems to delight in creating male characters that not only defy common stereotypes of attractiveness, but are firmly planted as far away from them as realistically possible.  But perhaps I’m totally wrong, and waxed handlebar moustaches and hirsute men are what’s hot in South Africa.  It matters little, as the characters are all well drawn with magnetic, if not attractive, personalities.

Once again though, what pretty much kept me glued to the page is the evocative atmosphere of the Klein Karoo and the little side stories that develop from letters written to Tannie Maria in her role as Advice and Recipe columnist.  I also enjoyed the somewhat spiritual, somewhat hallucinogenic connections with the African wildlife.

A lot of these first two books is built around Tannie Maria as a victim of spousal abuse (the spouse is dead when the series begins), but by the end of this book, she’s well on her way to putting herself back together, which makes me curious about what kind of book the third one will be.  It’s out now, but my library doesn’t currently have it.  Might have to go on the to-buy list for 2022.

 

Sadly average, even for modern cozy mysteries.

I was drawn in by the premise – brewing is all the rage in cozies at the moment, but this was the first moonshine book I’ve seen, and I liked the cover.

Unfortunately, the characters were just a little too storybook-dimensional; the good ones were just too good and the bad ones were ridiculous.  The MC started off being determined to ‘find the killer’ – which turns me off; I prefer the sleuths that are more inadvertent in their investigations.  But Kelly then puts the MC in a perfectly plausible situation for investigating, so I thought it might be ok – and then she activates the TSTL trope and I was back to irritated.  Top this off with a very childish grandfather and the whole thing just didn’t ring my bell.

Diane Kelly has written several previous series, and at least one of them was enjoyable, but this one is, despite its premise, just too formulaic.

 

Meh.

Several decades ago, when I started reading cozies, they were actually good; well written and well plotted puzzles that didn’t involve the grimy underbelly of society or graphic violence (the gory kind).

They’re still puzzles that don’t involve the grimy underbelly of society or graphic violence (the gory kind), but somewhere along the way – about a decade ago – publishers turned them into a commodity to be standardised; they created a formula for maximum efficiency and higher returns via quantity.  And they seemed to have completely done away with quality.

This is starting to piss me off, because as much as I enjoy a good vintage cozy/traditional mystery, sometimes I want a good cozy/traditional set in my own time, and I’m dammed if I can find one anymore (and by this, I mean new series, not the good ones that have lasted).

I thought Death by Committee had potential at the beginning, but by the halfway mark it became clear that the author (or her editor) was falling into the standard equation, and not only following formula in plotting, because sometimes there’s no escaping those tropes that work, but following a worn out formula for her characters too.  The current fad seems to be a middle aged woman riding heard on a band of hyperactive seniors.  Sophie Kelly makes this work with her series, but Morgan does not.  The seniors were flat and took advantage of the MC.  The MC’s righteous indignation failed to feel righteous, and the MC’s romantic interest failed to seem like anyone other than someone with a mood disorder.

The highlight of the book was the MC’s mastiff-mix, Zeke.

Editing was subpar, with several dropped time-lines (a memorable one is where the MC and her romantic interest make plans to meet for dinner that night and it never happens – the entire scene just disappeared).

It’s morning here as I write this, and I’m not a morning person, so let me just say this: it wasn’t a bad book.  It just wan’t a good one, either.

 

A so-so entry.  Good character, great cat, small-town setting.  Sophie Ryan (who also writes as Sophie Kelly) is a decent writer, too, but the plotting was weak in No Escape Claws.

View Spoiler »She gave herself away for me, when she offered up two suspects: one with children, and one without. Then she had the MC lament – repeatedly – the idea that another parent might be guilty and the tragedy would cost another child their parent. At that point, I had overwhelming suspicions; after she offered up the information that the suspect had just missed out on adopting a child of her own, I was certain. « Hide Spoiler

 

Overall, this is an enjoyable cozy series, as current cozies go.  This one just wasn’t one of the strongest.