Death by the Book
(Mercy McCarthy Mystery #2)
by Lucy Connelly

Irish scones, shamrock shortbread, a local literary festival… and a rather dead author? Join Mercy McCarthy on her next case!

Mercy and Lizzie McCarthy are settling in to the charming seaside village of Shamrock Cove on the west coast of Ireland. Lizzie throws herself into organizing a book festival and mystery writer Mercy even agrees to come out of her bookish hidey-hole to get involved. But then the event’s star author is found dead. James Brandt was killed by a falling bookshelf in his own cottage…

The local detective is not convinced by Mercy’s suspicion of murder but when someone else turns up dead, the police cannot ignore it. There’s just one problem: Mercy and Lizzie’s beloved dog Mr. Poe sniffs out the second body in the storeroom of their own bookstore. And now all the gossips seem determined to pin the murder on Mercy!

Convinced the police are focusing on a red herring in this real-life case, Mercy needs to act fast to clear her name. A meddling mayor, a cheerful chef and a bashful botanist make her suspect list, but it’s not until Mercy discovers a tatty old photograph in the local library archive that she is onto the killer’s trail.

With the police keen to shut her out of the murder investigation, can Mercy play this case by the book, or will she be the next to fall off the shelf…?

A totally gripping and twisty cozy crime novel, perfect for readers who love Agatha Christie, Carlene O’Connor or Faith Martin! This incredibly fast-paced and fun murder mystery will whisk you off to Ireland and won’t let you go until the final page!

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

Not that I would ever say that out loud. But I could think it loudly.

What a toad.

It is impossible to negotiate with a narcissist. You’ll just end up with both of you upset.

Like many politicians, he was a smooth talker… The ones on this side of the pond weren’t that different than their American counterparts. He reminded me of those sports guys who peaked in high school or college and kept telling the same stories over and over.

Sometimes, my thoughts came out of my mouth before I had a chance to stop them. I talked to myself while I worked. Who was I kidding? I talked to myself all the time. I always had characters in my head chatting. Talking out loud was how I stayed sane. Though, I wasn’t always aware I was doing it.

My Review:

Ms. Connelly has conjured another well-contrived and amusing mystery that kept the little pea in my brain pinging in various directions. This talented scribe is gifted in misdirection and has a writing style that is well-honed, engaging, and easy to follow. I continued to enjoy the odd ensemble of characters and reveled in the addition of the clever antics of the little pup named Poe.

An Irish Bookshop Murder
(Mercy McCarthy Mystery #1)
by Lucy Connelly

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

I’d offered to try to learn while we were here, but my sister had tried food I’d prepared and preferred to handle that chore herself. Her exact words had been Mercy, if there is nothing left to eat on the planet, then I’ll be grateful for your cooking. Until then, well, you have many other wonderful qualities.

I snorted. “As if.” “Oh, you if. You if all the time,” she said.

Now, if you’re going to arrest me for stealing evidence, I ask that you give me the courtesy of lunch first. No one wants me hangry in jail.

My Review:

This was a fun and lively read that was wryly humorous, engaging, and easy to follow. I’ve never made a trip to the old sod, but I would love to go if I could stay in a quaint little village such as this one. The murder mysteries were well-plotted, well-paced, and unpredictable. I enjoyed getting to know the quirky residents of the exclusive court and look forward to more of their adventures.

This cosy seaside village may seem picture perfect, but there are sketchy secrets hiding in plain sight…

Having left the big city behind, Sarah Vane is fully embracing her calmer life in the quaint coastal town of Merstairs. With more time for hobbies, she joins a very popular life drawing class at the local tea shop. But when their usual model, the ever-punctual Mr Williams, doesn’t turn up, Sarah’s worried. He’d been complaining of a cough just last week so she decides to check up on him.

Arriving at his crooked little cottage, it appears the front door isn’t quite shut. Stepping inside, Sarah is shocked to find Mr Williams slumped in his armchair. Casting her eyes down to his coffee table she sees a generous slice of Victoria sponge with one perfectly sized bite taken from it. Is this a case of death by cake?

As Sarah hunts around the cluttered cottage for clues, she finds that Mr Williams had a rather peculiar hobby. It seems that he was an avid collector of ladies’ delicates, and from the looks of it, all the washing lines of Merstairs have been raided. But could his quirky collection really be a motive for murder?

But then the case takes a darker turn when another elderly resident is found dead after eating a slice of red velvet cake. Sarah starts to wonder – why would anyone target pensioners with a sweet tooth? And in a village known for some of the best cakes in the county, can Sarah find the culprit before another life is taken?

A delightfully cozy, utterly compulsive and gripping murder mystery, perfect for fans of Agatha Christie, Betty Rowlands and Katie Gayle who are looking for their next addictive read.

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

Sarah had been terrified, when she’d first heard about the Men of Merstairs, imagining a cut-throat gang at the least. But, as she had rapidly discovered, they were people who’d need satnav and a guidebook to fight their way out of a paper bag. And then require extensive counselling afterwards.

Seastore was Merstairs’ biggest and newest supermarket, and was built in a blocky, unchallenging style that suggested the architect had only just finished playing with Lego and didn’t really see why they should stop now.

At this point, they’d had more false starts than an under-fives egg and spoon race.

My Review:

This was a fun and entertaining cozy featuring some snoopy seniors who just can’t seem to leave a mystery unsolved or pass up a piece of cake with a cup of strong tea. Ms. Castle laces her stories together with lashings of clever wry humor and populates them with knowable, amusingly detailed, and authentically quirky characters. I am already looking forward to the next installment.

MIMI JEAN PAMFILOFF is a USA Today and New York Times bestselling romance author with over a million books sold worldwide. Although she obtained her MBA and worked for more than fifteen years in the corporate world, she believes that it’s never too late to come out of the romance closet and follow your dream. Mimi lives with her Latin Lover hubby, two pirates-in-training (their boys), and the rat terrier duo, Snowflake and Mini Me, in Arizona. She hopes to make you laugh when you need it most and continues to pray daily that leather pants will make a big comeback for men.

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When she agreed to spend her last summer before college at her cousins’ house in Ireland, Charli Moretti never expected to meet anyone like Rhys Doyle. He was the first boy to ever make her heart flutter, and though their lives followed different paths after that fateful summer, she always remembered him as her first everything.

Sixteen years later, after a tumultuous divorce from her abusive husband, Charli is returning to Ireland a shell of the woman she once was. Life has tried to break her many times over, and now all she wants is a fresh start and an even keel. She’ll be working as an accountant at her uncle’s hotel, but what she doesn’t know is that Rhys Doyle works there, too. He’s the head of security, in fact, and he’s no longer the teenage boy she once knew.

With the rumours flying around that he and his fiancée just broke off their engagement, Charli decides it’s best to give Rhys his space. She knows personally how hard it can be when a relationship ends. The problem is, she can’t seem to stop running into him, and the more she gets to know the man he’s become the more those old feelings start to return.

Tropes & Themes:
~Second chance~
~Workplace romance~
~Protector hero~
~Summer fling~
~Tragic past~
~Starting over~

Quiet Longing is book #2 in The Quiet Love Series and can be read as a standalone.

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

It was an ache I’d barely even known was there before I met her. I wasn’t entirely sure what it meant, but it felt a lot like longing. Longing for connection, for someone to understand me, to know and accept all the things I normally kept hidden.

This world is full of people who’ll put us down. We don’t need to do it to ourselves, too.

Being alone in a room with Rhys was like swallowing the antidote to all my worries and fears. His presence seeped into my bloodstream like medicine.

It was the kind of place a burglar only had to breathe on the locks to get inside.

I think of nothing else. If you cracked open my skull, all you’d find are thoughts of you…

My Review:

I always enjoy a second-chance romance, and although I don’t typically appreciate angst, I didn’t seem to mind it this time. Written with two timelines and in my favorite dual point of view, the storylines were engaging and realistic and laced together with real-life concerns. Ms. Cosway’s writing style continues to be easy to follow, thoughtfully parsed, and poignantly penned.

“Not everything is meant to know, Ilana. Some things need their mystery to survive.”

Ilana has an enviable job at the opera house, a committed relationship, and a cozy Greenwich Village apartment, but the questions inside of her are growing insistent. Is it due to her scientist boyfriend’s research on how people make their decisions, or is she suffering suppressed grief from the death of her adoptive mother? She becomes curious about who she would be if she’d grown up in her birth home. Is she truly who she thinks she is? Has she ever freely chosen anything at all? When Ilana learns that her birth mom owns a pub upstate, well, what harm could there be in furtively dropping by for a drink? To see, just to see. What begins as curiosity about her choices evolves into a traumatic shift in her world. She loses control of her life. And then, chaos.

Lost in Thought is a novel about unconscious decision-making and the illusion of free will.

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

All the flippancy of the evening disappeared. They sank into an earnest whisper. They spoke to each other like kids sharing mysteries while perched in a tree house and rapt in the quiet woods.

You’re born. You get so many minutes. You die. That’s kinda it. How you spend your minutes is the only thing.

Saint Bernadette’s was a dismal boarding house in the center of the city. The nuns performed their earthly penance by running it. They were brittle women, sexless, and looking longingly toward death.

They sat in quiet companionship. Ilana knew for all the gifts that life had given her— her privileged education, her quiet good looks, her sense of practicality— it was the gift of this friendship that she most treasured.

“He’s not a piece of real property.” “True, there is very little real about him at this point— not his teeth, his hair, his left knee, his right hip, or his erection. He is more a collage of spare parts.”

She strikes me as a woman who would ride a llama bareback through a burning building in a pair of crotchless panties if she damn well felt like it.

Whenever Willow had an idea, she made lists, and most of the time, ecstatic intentions aside, the only thing she actually accomplished was the list.

What was not being said was getting loud inside the silence.

My Review:

This was not a happy ever-after romance, this was a coming into oneself women’s fiction tale with characters who were imperfect, realistically flawed, and struggling with real-world issues, work, and personal baggage. While at times I felt conflicted with the vagaries of the storylines when they were not going in the direction I expected or hoped for, kudos must be given to this clever author for her writing style. It was profoundly perceptive, poignant, insightful, and well-nuanced with authentic quirk, while eloquently detailed in a witty brain-teasing manner in magnificent Technicolor. I had to whittle down several pages of favorite quotes for those to include in this review.

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

Witty had a flair for the dramatic, appropriate since he was the drama teacher, but he sounded like the town crier warning that the sky was falling. Last week, the cafeteria substituted brownies for layer cake, and he made it sound like nuclear winter.

People were still looking at me like an odd specimen, some kind of science experiment egg they were waiting to see hatch in captivity.

Lucy looked around my small rustic kitchen, peeked at all the take- out containers in my fridge, and shook her head. “We need to get you out of the house before you become one with the furniture.”

Don’t be a lonely pot when there’s a lid out there that suits you…

My Review:

This was a fun and breezy read laced with clever wit, well-polished and amusing narratives, and insightful inner musings. This was my second foray into this talented storyteller’s craft, and I am even more impressed with her skills. Stacy Travis has a new acolyte.