The first in a new series, Margaret Dumas’ Murder at the Palace hit all my cozy mystery buttons. Nora gave up her screenwriting work for marriage, but her movie star husband has just run off with his gorgeous co-star. Nora’s best friend arranges for her to move to San Francisco to run a theater that plays classic films as a way of avoiding unwanted attention. The previous manager has recently died, and soon after Nora arrives, she finds another body […]

Bones Behind the Wheel is the tenth in the Haunted Guesthouse series by E.J. Copperman, but it is also a terrific starting point, as it explains everything the reader needs to enjoy this paranormal cozy mystery. The reintroduction of the premise, key characters, and setting was much appreciated. Once you get into the double digits for a book series, that’s a must. The series is enjoyable because of its comedy — innkeeper/detective Alison is fond of the sarcastic aside in […]

E.J. Copperman’s Bird, Bath, and Beyond, the sequel to Dog Dish of Doom, is even better than the first. The mystery stars Kay Powell, theatrical agent for acting animals. She’s now repping a parrot who’s a supporting cast member of a TV procedural, playing the sidekick of a medical examiner on a show with zombie detectives. When the gorgeous actor playing the doctor is found dead, shot, in his trailer, under the cage, the real-life detectives expect a talking bird […]

Fifth in the Asperger’s Mystery series, which started with The Question of the Missing Head by E.J. Copperman and Jeff Cohen four years ago, The Question of the Dead Mistress is as enjoyable as any in the series, simply due to the character interactions. Samuel, who has Asperger’s syndrome, runs an agency called Questions Answered. Each of the volumes is spurred by an unusual question, which usually leads to a murder to solve. In this case, the question is, “Is […]

Mystery fans, if you’re interested in learning more about the history of the medium, there’s a super-sized — over 1100 pages! — volume coming out this fall you’ll want to check out. Classic American Crime Fiction of the 1920s reprints four significant mystery novel launches, plus the inspiration for one of the classic gangster movies. And they’re all annotated by Leslie S. Klinger, who did The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes (and is responsible for getting Holmes into the public domain). […]

Dr. Greta Helsing, monster doctor, and her friends are back in Dreadful Company, the followup to Strange Practice by Vivian Shaw, and this book is better than the first. (You can read it without the first, as well, since only the characters continue, and you’re given what you need to know about them.) Greta is in Paris for a medical conference about treating the supernatural. Her vampire friend Ruthven is taking her to the opera, but that’s the last bit […]

Out this week is a Hollywood-set mystery that puts a green spin on the weirdo obsessive detective type. Last Looks by Howard Michael Gould introduces Charlie Waldo. He was an LA police detective before something bad (but predictable) happened, driving him to live in a tiny house in the woods in solitude. He’s decided, in order to minimize his impact on the world, that he can only own 100 things at any time. (Don’t feel too sorry for him. Those […]

It’s a wonderful world we live in, where you never have to accept that you’ve reached the end of a favorite series. If you have enough friends with similar tastes, there’s always more money to be made from a franchise extension. Even if swapping creators or eras means something isn’t as good as it once was. The latest example is the third new mystery starring Agatha Christie‘s Hercule Poirot, as written by Sophie Hannah. The Mystery of Three Quarters, out […]