By: Johanny Parker
There is a specific kind of reading contentment that the best cozy mysteries produce, a settled, warming, entirely pleasant sense of being somewhere you want to be with people you are glad to know, watching someone whose company you genuinely enjoy work toward a resolution that you are rooting for with the comfortable certainty that the resolution will arrive and the community will be restored to the warmth it briefly lost. N.E. Carlisle produces that reading contentment in Books, Bunnies, and a Body with the skill of a writer who has found her natural home in the genre and who inhabits it with the easy confidence of someone who knows exactly what she is doing and why.
Everything that made Hazelnuts and Homicide worthy of its Firebird Book Award for Cozy Mystery and its PenCraft Award for Best Fiction is present and deepened in this second installment. The setting is richer for being familiar, Hazelton’s spring atmosphere rendered with the specific sensory detail that Carlisle always brings to her seasonal settings. The protagonist is more comfortable and more fully herself, AnnĂ©e’s professional life as book rescuer and event organizer integrated into the investigative dimension of the plot with the organic ease of a series that has settled into its own rhythms. The community is warmer for being known, the wedding subplot giving the spring season an emotional register that extends the stakes of the mystery beyond justice into something more personally felt.
Oscar continues to be exactly the kind of animal character that cozy mystery readers love most, committed to his bunny patrol with the professional dignity of a dog who considers himself indispensable and who, not infrequently, is. The mystery is built with genuine craft, the clues assembled from AnnĂ©e’s book-buying work with the organic inevitability of a plot that knows where it is going from the very beginning. The resolution satisfies in the specific way that well-built cozy mysteries always satisfy, the click of a well-constructed puzzle arriving at its inevitable conclusion.
The recipes that close the book are the final generous touch of a writer who understands that a cozy mystery is not just an entertainment but an experience, one that she wants to extend beyond the last page and into her readers’ own kitchens. The Basque cheesecake serves eight, or two after a bad day, and after a book this genuinely pleasurable, the only question is which version you will be baking.
If you want a cozy mystery series that delivers everything the genre does best, setting, character, puzzle, community, warmth, and recipes, at the highest level the genre achieves, the Bonne Année Mysteries by N.E. Carlisle beginning with Hazelnuts and Homicide and continuing with Books, Bunnies, and a Body is exactly the series you have been looking for. Grab your copy on Amazon today and welcome spring in the most charming way possible.
