You will have noticed by now, if you are a regular visitor, that I enjoy cozy mysteries. Here are three I’ve read recently, two new (to me, anyway) series and one I’ve been reading for quite a while.
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Rock Bottom is the first in Jerusha Jones’ Imogene Museum cozy mystery series. I picked it up after seeing it on one of the several ebook sales emails I get every morning—I couldn’t resist the idea of a heroine who is the curator of a small town museum. Meredith Morehouse has left Seattle to live in a fifth wheel RV and run the museum in a small town in the Columbia River Gorge. The museum is a beautiful but old mansion—most of the plumbing in the fourteen original bathrooms has been disconnected for fear of leaks—and the globe trotting owner, Meredith’s boss, has just shipped another mysterious collection of crates from Europe. All is well with Meredith’s world, until her graduate student intern, Greg, vanishes somewhere between the museum where he works on weekends and the university where he studies anthropology.
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In a bit of a switch for a cozy mystery, Meredith doesn’t stumble over a dead body among the exhibits (although she does wonder about those chamber pots that insist on switching places when no one is watching). Instead, the story focuses on Greg’s disappearance, while Jones introduces a range of supporting characters who will, I presume, play their parts again in the six following books. The action doesn’t really heat up until fairly late in the book, but I enjoyed the build-up and the characters and setting—mystery fans will appreciate a dog named Tuppence rescuing a cat named Tommy—and I’m sure I’ll be reading more of the series.
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Here’s another new-to-me series by Waverly Curtis: The Barking Detective. Yep, another
dog detective, and this one is a talking chihuahua. In the first installment, Dial C For Chihuahua, down on her luck recent divorcee Geri Sullivan adopts a chihuahua, part of a shipment of tiny dogs sent to Seattle from Los Angeles, where the fad for purse pups has apparently run its course.
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Imagine Geri’s surprise when little Pepe starts talking to her—and she understands every word. Well, nearly every word—her Spanish isn’t that great, so Pepe switches, mostly, to English. Geri has bigger things to worry about than possible sanity questions. She’s almost out of money, desperate enough to apply for a job with a private detective of questionable repute. In between recounting wild stories of his previous careers (as a search and rescue dog, a bull fighter, a circus performer, and a starlet’s pet, the last one possibly true), Pepe proves to be a surprising asset in the detecting business.
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Given the ridiculous premise, Waverly Curtis (actually a two-person writing team) did a dog-gone good job of pulling me into the story. Pepe is such a charmer, dragging Geri into one loony situation after another (not to mention his swaggering interactions with other dogs), that I’ll be following his further adventures.
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A Touch of Magic is the seventh novel in Annabel Chase’s charming Spellbound paranormal cozy mystery series, continuing the humor that runs through these tales of Emma Hart adjusting to her new life as a witch. This time around Emma tackles the case of the murder of a vampire mayoral candidate, helps a teenage nymph accused of animal cruelty, and uncovers some secrets about her own background. All the familiar characters are back, as the remedial witches try to create inventive spells of their own, with the expected—or rather unexpected—results.
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So many fun and entertaining series! How will I ever catch up with the ones I’ve started when I continue to find more?
successful milliner who inherited her shop from her mother. Unfortunately some of her aristocratic clients seem to see no need to actually pay their bills, and Emily is forced to take extreme measures, using the burglary skills she learned from her father’s disreputable (but highly successful) family to take their valuables (some of which turn out not to be valuable at all) hostage.
a witch until she stumbled into Spellbound, a community of paranormals trapped in their town by a very old spell, and found she couldn’t leave. In this tale, Emma, now the local public defender (and witch in remedial training) takes on the case of a young were-lion who won’t explain why he was caught in possession of deadly nightshade. Meanwhile she frets over the impending marriage of her not-so-secret crush, fallen angel Daniel Starr, to mean-spirited (but gorgeous) fairy Elsa Knightsbridge. Has Daniel really fallen back in love with his ex-girlfriend, or has he been the victim of an Obsession potion administered by Elsa? 
sixth installment, 
actress who also works for her Uncle Bob’s PI firm (Duda Detectives), so naturally when her best friend, Candy, disappears from the touring company of 
by a wide variety of supernatural sorts trapped there by a curse so old no one really remembers the details. Emma, who didn’t even know she was a witch until she wandered into town and found she couldn’t leave (in 
brownie on burglary charges and tries her hand at speed dating to meet a wereweasel (that dates goes about as badly as one might expect), all the while investigating the mysterious glass coffin holding a comatose dwarf named Freddie. She goes for a hike with a werelion named Fabio and visits a hilariously demented witch in the local retirement home.
Lucky Charm 
Kay Hudson 