This book is about as cozy as cozy mysteries can be and I, for one, am absolutely here for it.

About the Book

As if the looming deadline to pay off a balloon mortgage isn’t enough to worry about, the five partners who own the small town book store The Paper Pirate find themselves menaced by a stealthy crook who systematically searches first the shop, then each of their homes. Because he takes nothing and barely leaves traces of his presence, the police can’t be of much help, and simply promise to keep an eye on Charlie Santorelli, Lavinia “Vinnie” Holcomb, Al Rockleigh, Felicia Cocolo and Lenora Stern.

It’s a mystery to them but the reader knows that Rick Foster, a shady rare-books dealer and his sidekick Nina Bartov are on the hunt for a particular old volume that sits unnoticed on a shelf in The Paper Pirate’s used book section. It’s an obscure early work of the not-terribly-successful author Benjamin Conway, and it’s badly defaced—but a very wealthy man is willing to pay Rick a half a million dollars for it. Seems an ancestor of his eluded the henchmen of a nineteenth-century dictator by escaping to New York, and eventually took refuge in the northeastern Pennsylvania countryside. Before he was captured and killed, he’d scribbled as much evidence of the tyrant’s sins as he could fit into the blank spaces of a copy of The Stargazer at Dawn and hid it where he hoped his comrades would find it. They never did.

The five friends also are members of a writers’ group, and each of them has a secret. One is penning an erotic novel on the sly, another hides a painful estrangement with an only child, and a deadly teenaged mistake causes a third to sabotage her every chance at happiness in the present. A partner who claims to be unpublished actually is a one-hit-wonder with a thirty-year-old best-selling novel followed by a crippling literary failure, and the last has a family with criminal connections—he’s spent half a lifetime avoiding them.

My Thoughts

This was one of those rare times when this felt like a one-off cozy mystery, and I was okay with it. Usually, cozies always feel like they’re part of a series, whether they end up being so or not, and I’m all for it. But I felt like I could be happy either way. I’d love to explore these characters more – there were five rich characters ready and willing to be mined for more. They were well-developed, and rather loveable – even the most curmudgeonly of the bunch – but I also felt like the story was wrapped up nicely, and if we didn’t meet them again, well – that was okay, too.

I have no idea if the author has any intention of revisiting these characters, but I thoroughly enjoyed each in their own right, and I’d love to see more of them. Each felt so alive like she’d literally plucked them out of real life, shown us a little slice of their life, and placed them back into their real lives. The Paper Pirate came alive like so many familiar independent bookstores and I wanted nothing more than to peruse its shelves.

The villains were horrible, and yet, understandable as all the best villains are. The mystery was simple, as we were seeing it from both sides – a less common but enjoyable story structure that I quite enjoyed in this book. It offered a nice foil for our group of amateur detectives. It was nice that our writers were all sorts, rather than all mystery or romance writers as one might expect to find in a cozy mystery series. It was a refreshing change.

I hope to see more by the author, whether in this series, or another. It seems she has published one other novel so far that is quite different. I’d love to see more cozy mysteries from her because I believe she could be a master of the genre. One thing I really loved was there were sections of the book – since it was about a group of writers – that were almost like a literal love letter to books and the written word. As a fellow writer and lover of literature, I enjoyed those passages and highlighted several of them to peruse again.

I am so grateful to the author and Love Books Tours for including me on this tour. I am a lover of cozy mysteries, and this was a supreme example of the genre.

Who’s It For

Anyone who loves cozy mysteries should read this book. It is one of the most perfect examples of the genre I have ever come across. While crime, mystery, and suspense were included, I also felt a little like I was wrapped up in a nice cozy blanket by the characters and their lives, which is my personal interpretation of the cozy genre. If you’re on the fence about cozies, I think this is a great one to cut your teeth on.

Content Warning: Domestic Violence, Suicide (off page), Violence, Adult Situations, Adult Language

About the Author

The author is a New Jersey native and long-time resident of rural Pennsylvania who works a day job in a technical field. She has been writing for many years, having started out as a teenager urged by a teacher to start a personal journal. When she tired of the chronicle of her own experiences, she began writing the fictional journals of imagined folks who eventually became characters in short stories and later in her novels.

She founded, along with two fellow authors, a writers’ workshop that has been meeting at a local library since 2013.

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