Blog · Genre Guide
Culinary Cozy Mysteries: Bakeries, Tearooms and a Body
· Blue Signal Press
If you like your murder with a recipe, these are the culinary cozy mysteries we publish: two bakeries, a tearoom, a lobster festival, a spice shop, and the amateur sleuths who run them.
A culinary cozy has three ingredients: a food business the heroine did not plan to run, a small town with opinions, and a body that turns up somewhere inconvenient. No gore, no profanity, and a killer who is somebody everybody knows. We publish several, and this is the guide to which one to open first, sorted by what is on the menu.
Bakeries
The Last Batch at Lavender Lane by Kate Linden. Greer Herrick has five days to sell the corner bakery her great-aunt left her. Then she opens the walk-in freezer and finds the developer who wanted the building dead on the floor, with her fingerprints on a handle she never touched. The bakery was hers. So was the body in the freezer. $2.99.
Short Measure by Felicity Grange. Elara Loveday spent fifteen years finding money other people had hidden, then moved to a Cotswold village to run a bakery and stop. Within an hour of seeing the food festival's charity accounts she finds the gap, and two days later the festival director is dead. A forensic accountant with flour on her hands. $2.99.
Tearooms and Tea
A Death Most Steep by Clara Weatherstone. Nora Calloway arrives in Harborwick, Maine with a divorce behind her and her grandmother's Lighthouse Tearoom in front of her. Six weeks later the man who has been trying to buy the building out from under her is dead. Some secrets steep longer than tea, and prove just as bitter. $2.99.
The Gilded Leaf by Margaret Quill. Forensic accountant Sylvie Rowan returns to Fog Harbor, Maine for the annual Lobster Festival and expects sea air and seafood, not a neighbor poisoned with foxglove in her morning Darjeeling. She came for the lobster rolls. She stayed for the murder. $2.99.
Spices, Herbs and Honey
A Pinch of Poison by Violet Mallow. Maren Holt arrives in Saltwick-on-Sea with a ruined career and no intention of staying. Inheriting her aunt's spice shop was supposed to be a temporary problem. Then the Craft Carnival opens, a body turns up, and Maren's knowledge of herbs matters more than she wanted it to. $2.99.
Last Bloom at Blue Hollow Farm by Lucy Ambler. Three months after inheriting her great-aunt's lavender farm in the Texas Hill Country, Nell Kincaid finds the developer who wanted her land dead between the rows, two days before the Lavender and Honey Festival. In Halo, Texas, everybody knows what grows in your garden. $2.99.
Not Food, But Close
If you have run out of recipes, two more in the same spirit: Ink and Alibis by Laurel Rook, set in a letterpress shop in Hollyhock Harbor, Maine, and Stopped at Six by Jocelyn Brightwell, where every clock in a watchmaker's workshop stopped just past six, and none of them by accident.
A Note on Festivals
You will notice a pattern. A lobster festival, a food festival, a craft carnival, a lavender and honey festival. That is not an accident. A festival puts the whole town in one place for a weekend, gives everybody a reason to be where they should not be, and gives the sleuth a deadline. It is the cozy mystery's favorite machine, and we lean on it on purpose.
We also keep a guide to our coastal cozy mysteries if the sea air matters more to you than the menu.
Free First Chapters
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