Cozy Mystery Humor

After stealing some priceless Russian jewels from the Stockholm Auction House, Martha and her gang flee to the small village of Hemmavid to lie low. But what they find is a village in crisis, so they decide they want to help revive the place. But to do so, the village needs money. In steps the League of Pensioners to arrange events to attract paying tourists. Which all turns out to be a rather delicate – and dramatic – balancing act when you are wanted by the police.

In The Case of the Ghost of Christmas Morning, Wodehousian clubman, flaneur, idler, and sleuth Anty Boisjoly pits his sardonic wits against another pair of impossible murders. This time, Anty Boisjoly’s Aunty Boisjoly is the only possible suspect when a murder victim stands his old friends a farewell drink at the local, hours after being murdered.

Maybe there are people in Antarctica with penguins in their basements, but in Virginia? Finding a body down there is somewhat more likely for Meg. Explaining the penguins' presence is easy; Meg's dad volunteered to take care of the birds until the future of the bankrupt local zoo could be determined. But identifying the body in the basement proves a harder task.

Meg Langslow was actually looking forward to renovating the old Victorian mansion she and her boyfriend Michael bought. But she wasn't thrilled by the lifetime of junk accumulated by the house's eccentric previous owner, Edwina Sprocket. The easiest solution: hold the end-all and be-all of gigantic yard sales.

When Ellison Russell, reluctant finder of bodies, chairs a gala in conjunction with the museum's Chinese funerary exhibit, she expects disaster. So, she's not remotely surprised when a body turns up. Ellison is willing to leave the investigation to the police till an attempt is made on her life. Now she's juggling evading a killer, her aunt's overly-amorous beau, her dog's new love interest, and Mother's displeasure. With bodies piling up, if Ellison's not careful, staying alive might be impossible.

Going undercover is second nature for Private Investigator Lola Cruz, but she’s out of her league when the case of a murdered Royals Courtside Dancer leads her to a local nudist resort. Parading around the sidelines of Sacramento’s professional basketball scene in a barely there cheerleading outfit is one thing - but parading around in nothing but a smile? If she’s going to have any chance of hiding this from her traditional family and on-again, off-again boyfriend, Jack, she’s going to have to keep a lot more than her duct tape bra and killer dance moves under wraps.

Meg Langslow and her boyfriend, Michael, are searching for some romantic alone time. She knows the perfect place for a private getaway: her aunt's cottage on the tiny island of Monhegan. But when a series of events leads to the couple being trapped in the cottage with her entire family, their private getaway vacation slowly turns into a disaster. Meg doesn't think anything more could go wrong until a resident of the island with close ties to her mother is murdered. When her father becomes the chief suspect, she knows she can no longer sit by the cozy fireplace.

After being duped out of her life savings in Germany, Val Fremden retreats home to Florida with more than just her pride in tatters. Broke, jobless, divorced, and 45, she knows starting over won’t be easy. But when her only friend suddenly turns up dead, Val begins to wonder if the world is out to get her.

Every nosy neighbor, gossipy friend, and meddling relative is just one good mystery away from becoming a detective. From behind locked doors or out in broad daylight, driven by chance or curiosity, amateur sleuths get in over their heads in these six hair-raising, hilarious stories.

Molly is terrified that she may lose her farm because her idle husband has left her for a rich hobby winemaker and is demanding his half of the land. Meg enlists Mother's help to find Molly a divorce lawyer, which Mother is all the more willing to do because the unfaithful husband's new girlfriend is the bete noire of the wine pavilion. She is so universally disliked that Meg begins to worry about her safety. But it's the unfaithful husband whose murdered body she and Michael find that night.

Meg has been roped into participating in a weaponsmithing competition, a Forged in Fire wannabe organized by a blacksmith friend. Meg originally turned down an invitation to participate, but the night before the filming starts, someone attacks Faulk, her blacksmithing mentor, breaking his arm and eliminating him from the contest before it begins. Meg agrees to step in as his replacement to keep the project from failing. She's not thrilled that the filming will take place during December—Christmas is already a crazy time for her.

When Meg's grandmother, Cordelia, hosts a Renaissance Faire at her craft center, the whole family is put to work: Meg handles the blacksmithing, Michael and the boys will be performing, and no one misses the opportunity to dress up in full regalia. More exciting to Grandfather is the pair of rare falcons he discovers breeding at the fairgrounds. Concerned for their well-being amid all the activity, he appoints himself their protector. When one of the actors performing at the fair is found dead, Grandfather is a prime suspect.

As the holidays draw near in Caerphilly, Mother volunteers to take part in a big Christmas-themed decorator show house - each room of a temporarily untenanted house is decorated to the hilt by a different decorator for the public to tour. Of course, Mother insists that Meg pitch in with the organization, and she finds herself surrounded by flamboyant personalities with massive egos clashing and feeling their professional reputations are at stake.

Meg is relaxing in the hammock, taste-testing Michael’s latest batch of Arnold Palmers and watching the hummingbirds at their feeders when her hopes for a relaxing early summer morning are dashed. First her father recruits her to help him install a new batch of bees in the hive in her backyard. Then Mayor Shiffley recruits her to placate the NIMBYs (Not in my backyard), as she calls them—a group of newcomers to Caerphilly who have built McMansions next door to working farms and then do their best to make life miserable for the farmers.

Poppy Fields has a movie-star mother, 84 million Instagram followers, paparazzi following her every move, and a problem. Her Mexican vacation just went sideways (abducted-by-a-drug-lord sideways). Suddenly her life resembles one of her mother's movies, except the bullets are real, people are dying, and there's no guarantee of a happy ending. Surrounded by trained killers and unsure who she can trust, only one thing is certain - if Poppy doesn't escape, this vacation will be her last.

Christmas in Caerphilly is wonderful! Unless you’re a Canadian whose inconsiderate boss is forcing you to spend the holiday there, far from family and friends, with only a slim chance of a white Christmas. Meg already has her hands full, trying to make the season festive for the dozen programmers who are staying with her and Michael while working on a rush project with her brother’s software company. At least it’s an interesting project, since the Canadian company is doing forensic genealogy and DNA analysis. But when the boss is found murdered, there are too many suspects.

Elderflower Tea Shop is next door to Cardinal Woolsey's, the yarn shop Lucy runs and home to the late-night Vampire Knitting Club. The tea shop owners are a pair of octogenarian spinsters and old family friends, so Lucy wants to help clear up the mystery that's keeping their shop closed. But murder isn't the only issue troubling the Miss Watts. A man has come between them. Miss Florence Watt is being romanced by an old flame, one Mary Watt distrusts.

It's another holiday and Mayor Randall Shiffley has turned Caerphilly, Virginia, into Spooky City, USA. The residents are covering every window with cobwebs and roaming the streets in costume to entertain the tourists, and Meg's grandfather is opening a new 'Creatures of the Night' exhibit in the zoo. When a real body at the zoo and a suspicious fire at the Haunted House threaten to mar the town's creepy fun, it's up to Meg Langslow to save Halloween.

For the residents of 44, Scotland Street, life in Edinburgh's intriguing New Town is a thing to be relished. After all, there are new faces to excite Domenica's anthropological imagination, precious moments with his triplets for Matthew to savor, and the prospect of a trip to the promised land of Glasgow for young Bertie.

On the day he retires, Inspector Ashwin Chopra inherits two unexpected mysteries. The first is the case of a drowned boy, whose suspicious death no one seems to want solved. And the second is a baby elephant. As his search for clues takes him across the teeming city of Mumbai, from its grand high rises to its sprawling slums and deep into its murky underworld, Chopra begins to suspect that there may be a great deal more to both his last case and his new ward than he thought.