Cozy Mystery Book Reviews
All of the books shown below are stand-alone cozy crime novels, the first book in a new cozy mystery series, or part of a critically acclaimed cozy series. You can scroll down to browse all reviews, look for books by author, or click on the links below to find reviews and recommendations by category:
A mystery ghostwriter gets drawn into a real-life mystery when she finds her ex-boyfriend floating in the canal next to her houseboat.
Dee comes up with a marketing idea for her retro motel in the wilds of California and accidentally triggers a modern day gold rush that turns deadly.
Jessica visits Boston and her friend P.I. Harry McGraw. When Harry is too busy to take a case, Jessica steps in to help an old acquaintance.
Three women dating the same man decide to form an unlikely alliance to get revenge, but end up working together to solve a mystery to make sure they don’t get arrested.
Georgia “Cussy” Hollingsworth inherits a working horse and cattle ranch and a mystery. She returns to her country roots in Kentucky to decide what kind of life she wants and to find out who killed her beloved uncle.
Frances, the American-born Countess of Harleigh, is newly widowed and being accused of murdering her husband. She tries to solve a mystery during the London Season while polite society watches her every move
Rose is planning a St. Olaf-themed wedding in Miami. When Dorothy's wedding date is found dead and face down in a delicious cheesecake, the Golden Girls go undercover to find the real culprit.
Katharine Wright is spending the summer of 1904 at the World's Fair in St. Louis. When a woman dies in Katharine's arms and uses her last breath to whisper a clue about her death, Katharine decides to investigate.
The Shepherd Sisters sort through horticultural clues to solve another mystery after their Uncle Max finds a body at the flower shop where Savanna is teaching a still-life art class.
A writer uses her own guide to solving murder mysteries to figure out whodunnit after her boss is accused of pushing someone off a cliff on Bainbridge Island.
The annual Earth Fest in Sea Glass Beach takes a deadly turn when the queen of compost is poisoned with killer granola. Milliner Paige Andrews and her friends in the Beachside Dining Club investigate.
Honey Springs is hosting a writing retreat with a big-name bestselling author. When a body is found posed just like a scene from one of the victim’s mysteries, Roxy launches a caffeine-fueled investigation.
Perimenopausal divorcee Amelia Matthews inherits a haunted Florida inn int he psychic capital of the world and uses her psychic gift to solve a decades-old murder.
Bookseller Annie Murray, who works in an Agatha Christie themed bookshop, makes a shocking discovery in a secret bookcase during a mystery-themed book festival.
When Willa's ex-fiancé and ex-best friend open a pop-up chocolate shop across the street from her cheese shop, she's furious. Things go from bad to worse when someone becomes a victim of death by chocolate.
It's 1966. Samuel Pepys and his two inquisitors celebrate Christmas and attend the Frost Fair. A chilling discovery in the ice turns merriment into mystery. Abby and Jacob must investigate to solve the mystery.
Things come apart at the seams when Shelby Phillips reluctantly takes over her mother’s needlepoint shop, gets entangled in a murder investigation, and comes face to face with a crafty killer.
Emma painstakingly planned everything for the grand opening of her new wellness spa in Carmel-by-the-Sea. The only thing she didn’t plan on was becoming the number one suspect in the murder of a rival spa owner.
With Halloween approaching, gemologist and seer Shay Myers is busy brewing witchy teas and coming up with a plan to win a decorating contest. But when she sees dark visions in her tea leaves, she decides to mix in.
When her pen pal, Frieda, goes missing, former nun Nora Breen goes to the seaside town where Frieda was last seen. Nora investigates and finds a hotel full of strange people and secrets.
Sheriff Kenni Lowry thought she had her hands full planning her wedding and dealing with her pushy Mama. Then a local judge gets murdered, and a baffling case ensues.
Mae is enjoying Normal, Kentucky's brand new Climb the Cliffs festival until she finds one of the competitive climbers at the bottom of a cliff. She investigates with the Laundry Club ladies to find out who pushed the climber.
Remi and her best friend just went all in on game-themed donut shop. When a dead man with dice is found outside their building, they get drawn into a dangerous game and face the ultimate challenge.
When treasure hunters come to Fredericksburg in search of a rare Edgar Allan Poe poetry book, Liv has a dark premonition and goes head to head with a formidable foe named The Falcon.
When Josiah Reynolds attends a sledding party in the Bluegrass world of oak-cured bourbon, antebellum mansions, and Thoroughbred horse farms, she ends up investigating the death of a retiree who shows up dead at his own party.
When art expert Savanna Shepherd moves back home to Carson on Lake Michigan, she and her two sisters get entangled in a murder mystery involving forged artwork and a mysterious death.
Siobhán is studying for her Detective Sargeant exams and working with her husband to solve a puzzling mystery at Kilbane’s Top Garden Contest.
When a professor falls to his death on the Clarion University campus and an innocent student is blamed for the crime, mystery writer and educator Jennifer (Jen) Dalton and a few of her colleagues launch their own investigation.
When Mary, a local woman, is terrorized by bizarre threats and a supposed curse, antique store owner Bella Winter gets pulled into a murky mystery. The more Bella investigates, the stranger the puzzle becomes.
Review of The Antique Store Detective and the May Day Murder
When the recently widowed Ginny Cole retired to the small English village of Little Shaw, she expected a quiet life. Instead, she found a body in the library, a clever stray cat named Edgar, and a group of sleuthing widows.
Trouble brews when Roxy’s glamorous modeling friend Vanessa comes to town. Roxy mixes in, stirs up all the steamy secrets, and solves a twisty mystery while serving up the best coffee in town.
When her friend Lucien is accused of poisoning a dinner guest, veterinarian Rylie Sunderland investigates with the help of the victim’s handsome and charming son.
When crochet enthusiast Annie Sara Hart inherits a yarn shop in small town Indiana, she finds interesting locals and an intriguing mystery she can’t seem to ignore. Annie fixes up the yarn shop and starts poking around to see what she can learn.
When Lou, a New Orleans ghost tour guide who can see ghosts, comes under suspicion for the murder of a rival tour guide, she must use her powers and the help of her ghostly friends to solve the mystery.
When a bird-loving naturalist falls into a ravine during the annual Buckeye Trail Town Festival, garden center manager Molly Green gets tangled in the investigation. The more secrets she digs up, the more the mystery grows.
The annual fall Timber Festival has come to Pine Bluff, but the fun is cut short when amateur senior sleuth Dawna finds a lumberjack with an axe buried in his chest.
When sixty-something Dawna Carpenter finds a body and a framing hammer in her hometown hardware bathroom, she pairs up with her adult daughter and sets out to nail a killer.
Review of Hammers and Homicide
Dee Stern is tired of writing sitcoms, so she buys a retro motel on the edge of the California wilderness. When her first guest involuntarily "checks out," Dee and her pal Jeff start sleuthing.
Review of A Very Woodsy Murder
Bella Winter owns Vintage Winter, an antique store in a charming little town in the Shropshire Hills. When she finds the body of a treasure hunter who was murdered while digging something up in the dark, Bella does some digging of her own and uncovers a hoard of secrets and suspects.
Review of The Antique Store Detective
Berit Gardner is on deadline and struggling to write, so she heads to a rundown Cornwall village with more intrigue than she could ever make up. When a man mysteriously dies in a library explosion, Berit searches for answers and uncovers surprising secrets in Great Diddling.
Review of The Murders in Great Diddling
Single mom Kate Buckley races to Shamrock, Massachusetts after receiving an urgent message from her sister Colleen. When she arrives, she finds a murdered Irish step dancer and gets drawn into the investigation to protect her sister, who may or may not have had a hand in the dancer’s death.
Joanne Fluke’s Lake Eden Cookbook: Hannah Swensen’s Recipes from the Cookie Jar features an enormous collection of recipes. This compilation includes never-before-seen recipes and title recipes from the first 29 books in the Hannah Swensen Mystery series.
Ally McKinley is a retired television researcher who owns a malthouse turned guesthouse in the Scottish Highlands. When her first guest ends up dead, Ally gets the locals, including an earl at a nearby castle, to spill the tea. She discovers that the dead American tourist had a big secret and more than one enemy.
Tony Gillingham stops by a lively party at a quintessential English country house to visit his pal Bill Beverly. The two friends end up investigating a mystery when someone is shot and their eccentric host disappears. This Golden Age mystery (written by Winnie the Pooh author A.A. Milne) is set in the 1920s.
Two friends, Angela Benbow and Caledonia Wingate, convince two other reluctant pals to help them solve a mystery. The four amateur sleuths are determined to discover what happened to their fellow retirement community resident, Sweetie, who met an unfortunate end. As they investigate, they learn explosive secrets about their fellow residents and themselves.
Allie Catt is a caterer, personal chef, and literature buff in a North Carolina mountain community. She creates custom dinner parties for book lovers based on classic literature, such as Pride and Prejudice, Rebecca, and The Great Gatsby. When a friend gets accused of murder, Allie channels her favorite fictional detectives and cooks up a plan to solve a mystery.
Miss Marigold Manners has the poise and style of a well-bred young woman from a wealthy Boston family. Unfortunately, she has a poor person's bank account. When she gets an invitation from a mysterious long-lost relative, she heads to Great Misery Island off the coast of Salem, Massachusetts. She finds strange people with plenty of secrets. Murder, malice, and mayhem ensue.
Ricki, the owner of a vintage cookbook and kitchenware store in the Bon Vee Culinary House Museum in New Orleans, is assisting the museum staff in planning a haunted house tour for Halloween. When a dead body unexpectedly turns their prop tomb into a real one, Ricki embarks on a thrilling investigation, unearthing more than a few buried secrets.
Cheesemonger Willa Bauer and the staff of her cheese shop, Curds & Whey, are in neighboring Yarrow Glenn to participate in the fall Dairy Days festival! The festival has lots of dairy-themed activities, including butter sculptures, goat races, cheese wheel relays, and a Miss Dairy pageant. But good times are not to brie. A Miss Dairy contestant is found under a pile of milk jugs, and Willa is forced to find out who wanted the princess out of the whey.
Bailey Briggs is an aspiring graphic novelist and the manager of the Lazy Bones Books in the Halloween-themed town of Elyan Hollow, Oregon. Bailey is confronted with two puzzling mysteries while coordinating the town’s Spooky Season Literary Festival.
Roxi Carlucci, a part-time private investigator in Fresno, has a new mystery to solve when a killer writes an ending for one of the authors attending the first-ever Tower Halloween Mysteryfest. It’s up to Roxi and her P.I. cousin Stephen to figure out whodunnit before Mysteryfest can become murderfest.
Emily Dalle is a lifestyle blogger who stumbles upon the body of a talk show host nicknamed the Queen of Mean. Emily crowdsources clues by reaching out to her online audience. Before they can help her solve the mystery, she gets a message from the murderer who tells her to back off...or else.
Photographer Bobbie Brooks goes from witness to suspect when she finds the body of a fellow photographer under the local covered bridge. Now it’s up to her and the rest of the Keep It Snappy Shutter Club to capture enough clues to catch a killer.
Lindsey Bakewell is hosting a tea party at her iconic lighthouse bakeshop for special guest star Vivi Lemonberry, a celebrity chef looking to reboot her career. When a scandal sours the event, Lindsey goes from baking to sleuthing.
Bailey King, an Amish Candy shop owner and star of an Amish Sweets television show, has perfected a gingerbread man recipe just in time for a Candy Land themed Christmas on the village square in Harvest, Ohio. When one of her Amish friends is murdered, Bailey vows to solve the crime and sifts through the clues with her sweet sheriff fiancé.
Jessica Fletcher is spending Christmas in Cabot Cove! The whole Cabot Cove community is pitching in to plan holiday festivities in hopes of becoming Maine’s number one Christmas town. When the wife of a Boston tycoon ends up dead, it's up to Jessica to figure out who's been naughty and nice.
Reporter Violet Rhinehammer is celebrating a magical Christmas in the small, charming town of Holiday Junction when she stumbles across a twisty holiday mystery involving a stolen ornament design. She’ll have to dig through a snow pile of secrets to figure out whodunnit.
Journalist Maddie Marlow is stranded at the Merry Monarch Pub in the Yorkshire Dales because of a Christmas Eve blizzard. As the pub guests participate in a scavenger hunt, the power goes out, and someone gets murdered. Now the survivors need to figure out which one of them is a cold killer.
Cozy mystery writer Maggie Chase and thriller writer Ethan Wyatt write books for the same publisher. She can't stand his perfectly chiseled face, and he can't seem to remember her name. They accept an invitation to spend Christmas at a famous mystery author’s estate. But then their mysterious host disappears from a locked room and a body turns up, leaving Maggie and Wyatt with two mysteries to solve. There’s a good chance they’ll kill each other. Or kiss each other. Or both.
Mae West is hitting the slopes and solving mysteries when the Southeast Olympic ski trials come to Normal, Kentucky. With backup from her Laundry Ladies Club, Mae plans on finding out exactly who took the pro skier out of the competition.
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