Booked for Murder: 04/02/25

Booked for Murder by P.J. Nelson and Hallie Bee Bard (Narrator) (2024) is the start of the Old Juniper Bookshop mystery series. Madeline Brimley has returned to Enigma, Georgia, after the death of her Aunt Rose. She has inherited the woman's bookshop built into an old Victorian house.

Minutes into arriving at the bookshop, Madeline sees that the seven sided gazebo in the back garden is on fire. From there she receives a series of threats to the bookshop. While she doesn't want to take them seriously, a college aged woman is murdered in the shop and one last fire is set.

The novel has the hallmarks of an early 2000s cozy. It has a young woman estranged from family being forced to move to a small town to inherit a business that is also a home. She's met with resistance and unsure if she can make a go of running the business.

The tone of this opening novel is much darker than the other contemporaneous cozies that I've read. It reminds me most of Crewel World by Monica Ferris, the start of the Needlecraft mystery series. Especially in the choice of victim, a young woman who Madeline had seen as almost a younger sister or daughter-figure.

A more typical approach to a first volume is to make the murder victim a serious threat to the wellbeing of the shop. They aren't a likable person who is coded as a helpful sidekick or future employee. Killing the sidekick feels like a betrayal.

Another hallmark of the cozy mystery is the small town location. It's a way to create an ensemble cast of characters with a quirky culture. Enigma fits the bill as a small town but the characters spend so much of their time proving to Madeline that they are worldly despite living in Enigma.

Take for instance the characters created by Maddie Day. She populates her mysteries with characters who speak in the local dialect but are still diverse. They get to prove their worldliness through how they live and act in their small town. Here, though, we get dialog after dialog where characters interrogate Madeline's preconceived notions.

My point is, the mystery feels tacked on. It feels like it should be a standalone literary fiction that has mystery elements. The mystery tropes are there but I'm not convinced that the author reads enough mysteries to know how or when to use them. Further evidence of this is the afterword where the author mentions having been an author in residence in a variety of small Georgian towns.

The next book is All My Bones which releases December 2, 2025.

Three stars

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