Lighthearted and free of violence and gore, these witty books are the perfect antidote for tough times. If you’ve never read any, here’s where to start.
Want a charming mystery with sparkling prose?
Caudwell’s four books featuring a group of young London lawyers and their mentor, the Oxford professor Hilary Tamar, may be the platonic ideal of a good mystery series: intelligent and elegantly mannered, filled with sparkling prose, pithy dialogue and characters making terrible choices. Start at the beginning with “Thus Was Adonis Murdered,” ostensibly about a murder in Venice, and prepare to be utterly charmed.
Like some modern-day Miss Marples?
Joyce, Elizabeth, Ron and Ibrahim are so beloved after four best sellers (there’s a fifth on the way, as well as a movie adaptation) that it can be easy to forget what a revelation they were when Osman’s debut novel came out. The friends, all residents of Coopers Chase Retirement Village, prefer police reports and autopsy photos to knitting and jigsaw puzzles. They apply themselves to solving cold cases because “they didn’t like to think there were guilty people still happily going about their business, sitting in their gardens, doing a Sudoku, knowing they had got away with murder.”
This series — offbeat, engaging, funny and deeply humane — made me rediscover my love of mysteries, and it can do the same for you, too.
If you’ve read it and loved it, try … “Murder at Gulls Nest,” by Jess Kidd; M.C. Beaton’s Agatha Raisin series; or Janice Hallett’s stand-alone novels.
Allergic to anything cutesy?
Reading a Joan Hess novel is about as astringent an experience as it gets: battery acid-level humor, wicked descriptions of small-town life and no one — absolutely no one — spared. Her Maggody series is great fun, but I’m partial to the one featuring the bookstore owner Claire Molloy, who starts her sleuthing adventures after hosting a party for the romance novelist Azalea Twilight (real name: Mildred Twiller), who is killed the same night. Naturally, the list of suspects encompasses practically everybody in town.
Is there such a thing as a cozy spy novel?
On a whim, and because no one seems to care what she does with her life, Emily Pollifax, a plucky widow, decides to join the C.IA. Then her first assignment, a simple courier job in Mexico City, becomes unexpectedly dangerous, ultimately landing her in an Albanian prison. Mrs. Pollifax proves her mettle: “It wasn’t that she had so much character, thought Mrs. Pollifax, but rather that always in her life she had found it difficult to submit. The list of her small rebellions was endless. Surely there was room for one more?” Just imagine James Bond as a grandma.
Historical mysteries your jam?
A mouthwateringly delicious read?
The culture and culinary delights of Singapore come alive in Yu’s novel. Rosie “Aunty” Lee, something of a busybody, has shrugged off widowhood to open her own restaurant. But when she gets drawn into a local murder investigation, it soon becomes clear she has a real talent for sleuthing — not just because of her innate inquisitiveness, but because she plies people with mouthwatering home-cooked treats when she needs information from them. Guaranteed to make you hungry!
Cozy cats?
Braun, a longtime Detroit Free Press editor, wasn’t the first to write cat mysteries, but she was the first to turn them into a best-selling franchise. “The Cat Who Could Read Backwards” introduced the Michigan newspaperman Jim Qwilleran and Koko, the siamese cat he inherited after the murder of its former owner, a ridiculously pretentious art critic. Both it and the subsequent two books are acerbic, funny, well-crafted mysteries rooted firmly in “medium-boiled” territory, and in Braun’s newspaper experience. (The rest of the “The Cat Who …” books, published after a two-decade hiatus, aren’t as strong.
Love a punny title?
Blacke is a mystery-writing veteran with multiple series, but I’ve got a soft spot for her cozy forays — especially this one, the first of a three-book cycle set at a family-owned Texas record shop. Now operated by the sisters Juni, Maggie and Tansy, the store’s set for its grand reopening when oops, a body falls out of the supply closet, and their uncle vanishes without warning. Blacke keeps everything spinning as nimbly as a D.J.
Like a cozy with a paranormal tinge?
Leda Foley, who’s trying to get her travel agency off the ground, wishes that her psychic abilities were a little less, well, erratic. When she rebooks a flight for the Seattle police detective Grady Merritt at the last minute, he demands answers after the original plane explodes on the tarmac. “I changed your flight because I did know something was wrong — but I swear to you, I didn’t know what it was,” she tells him. “I might’ve been vibing off the cosmic certainty of the plane crashing.” That convinces him: Leda’s his perfect crime-solving sidekick.
If you’ve read it and loved it, try … “The Frame-Up,” by Gwenda Bond, or the Aunt Dimity series, by Nancy Atherton.
After a disastrous breakup, Lila Macapagal comes home to help run her family’s Filipino restaurant, Tita Rosie’s Kitchen. When her food critic ex-boyfriend shows up and promptly drops dead into a bowl of ginataang bilo-bilo, naturally Lila becomes the police’s prime suspect. The mystery here is a winning one, but what makes this book stand out are the ways Manansala draws the ties between food, friends, family and love.
Like quirky, unexpected sleuths?
Molly Gray has always found people, with their messy emotions and illogical behaviors, confusing. Her job as a maid at the Regency Grand Hotel brings her unfettered joy — there’s nothing she likes more than restoring order to a chaotic guest room — until she discovers the hotel’s most prized guest dead in his suite and ends up the prime suspect. More than just a mystery, this is an affecting tale that shines a warm light on loneliness, invisibility, friendship and what it means to be happy.
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