February is (usually) a good month for Cozy books

The Sherlock Holmes Bookshop Mystery series, by Vicki Delaney

I started an unseasonably (and alarmingly) warm winter with a quadruple cozy mystery binge. What exactly is a cozy mystery, you may be wondering! The key elements are: violence and sex occur offstage; there is an amateur sleuth who solves the crime, often a woman, with a community job such as librarian, shop owner, dog trainer, or caterer, and with some kind of personal connection to someone on the local police force; the crime occurs in a small town where the principle characters all know each other; maybe there is a cat.

The Sherlock Holmes Bookshop Mystery series is a set of (currently) 9 books. The amateur sleuth character is a woman (check!) from England who has resettled in the small Cape Cod town of West London (check!) to manage her great uncle’s shop, the Sherlock Holmes Bookshop and Emporium (check!) which is also the home of Moriarty, the cat (check!). Her on-again/off-again boyfriend is a local police detective (check!) and her best friend works in an adjoining shop running a tea room. Both the book shop and the tea room are thematically based on Sherlock Holmes (BONUS POINTS!). The formula is strong with this one!

All of the books focus on a murder that takes place when a well-known out-of-towner comes to participate in a local event, that in every case is connected with or located at the bookshop. An amazing coincidence for little West London! I’ll say this, four books in and I would definitely not be hosting an event at the Sherlock Holmes Bookshop and Emporium. I’d be safer jaywalking across a busy 6-lane highway!

If you like cozy mysteries, and I do, this is a fun series. Vicki herself is local to Prince Edward County, and in fact, I bought these 4 books directly from her at a Christmas craft fair just down the way in Wellington. I could, perhaps, have reconsidered binging them all at once. The repetitive formula would be better served by having some space between each book (for me, at least), on top of which Vicki tends to annoyingly overuse the word “pastiche” which might be less apparent if you space the books out. Apart from that, however, 10/10 as cozies go.

Here’s the list of the first four books:

• Book 1: Elementary, She Read
• Book 2: Body on Baker Street
• Book 3: The Cat of the Baskervilles
• Book 4: A Scandal in Scarlet