They are my guilty pleasure.  My beach read.  My no-brainers.  And I'm not ashamed to admit it.  I love cozy mysteries.  Give me a whodunnit set in a bed and breakfast/ English country house/ museum/ university/ small town/ bakery/ tea shop/ book store/ library with an amateur sleuth who has no skills or training but always figures out the bad guy before the police, and I'll choose it every time.


When my sister and I used to trade books BK (Before Kindles), I would tell her to never give me any book that had "A Novel" on the cover.  Life is hard enough; I read to escape from it, and nothing relaxes me more than to pick up a cozy and read a chapter or two before I fall asleep at night.  Lately I've been working my way through Leslie Meier's Lucy Stone series.  My recent failure to progress in Wicked had me reading three of Meier's books in a row while trying to get past page 106.  The latest that I've finished is Turkey Day Murder.

Lucy Stone lives in a small coastal town in Maine where her husband is a restoration carpenter, and she works part-time for the weekly newspaper.  She has four children ranging in age from 6 to 18.  Part of the joy of reading cozies is the true suspension of disbelief; just like Jessica Fletcher in Murder She Wrote, Lucy must live in the murder capital of the world.  Everyone there wants someone else dead and is not afraid to act on it.  Of all the books in the series, and I have to read series in order, this is probably the weakest plot so far with lots of different plot lines that don't necessarily tie together or are even necessary to the story that are resolved too conveniently and neatly in the last few pages of the book all at once and mostly through happenstance.  Even the murderer and why he does it are seemingly thrown into the story in the last few pages without a lot of thought.  Even with all of that, I've already picked up the next in the series, Wedding Day Murder, to be my next read as I plug along on Wicked.  Wonder which I'll finish first?