Cozies are my favorite books. I write them. I read them. I wished I lived in them sometimes. Well, I wish I lived in the charming towns and shops where they are set. I have no interest in finding a dead body or solving a murder. However, there is nothing better than to escape into a cozy when the real world seems a bit all too much. When I really want an escape, I like to read a paranormal cozy. These are cozies with a little bit of magic to help or hinder the sleuth find the killer. They can have everything from witches to fairies to ghosts to mystics. Each is unique in how it treats the magical side of things in the stories, and that’s what makes paranormal cozies so much fun to read. My list of favorites includes both new and old titles, books by friends and books by authors I’ve never met. They are in no particular order. I hope you find some here to add to your TBR pile.
I start out my list with an older title, but a personal favorite, A Potion To Die For by Heather Blake. In this novel, Carly Bell Hartwell is the owner of Little Shop of Potions, a magical potion shop specializing in love potions in Hitching Post, Alabama. Carly’s potions are popular in the town. Maybe a little too popular as a soothsayer recently predicted that one of the married couple in Hitching Post was headed for divorce. Now, it seems that every married couple in town wants a love potion from Carly to save their marriage. To make matters worse, Carly finds a dead man in her shop clutching one of her potion bottles in his hands. Now, she is a suspect for a murder that could send her to prison and ruin her business for good.
A newer title that I loved is Haunted Homicide by Lucy Ness. For me the bonus of this series is it was inspired by the area where I personally live, so it’s always fun to recognize bits of my hometown. In the mystery, Avery Morgan is the brand new manager of Portage Path Women’s Club. The club is housed in an old historic home and recently suffered a fire. Avery is in charge of keeping the restoration on track. The only issue is she had the unlikable club president watching her every move. Things go from bad to worse when she stumbles upon the club president’s dead body in the basement and finds a ghost from the 1920s, Clemmie Bow, nearby. Avery and Clemmie team up to solve the murder.
A Spell for Trouble by Esme Addison is a debut novel and an excellent entry into the world of paranormal cozies. What I like most about the story is how different it is from other magical cozies I have read. Its magic is built around the idea of mermaid folklore. Who knew that had the potential for cozies? In the mystery, Aleksandra Daniels returns to the seaside town of Bellamy Bay, North Carolina after twenty years away. She learns that her family is believed to be magical healers descended from mermaids and not everyone in town is happy that her family is there. This becomes more apparent when her aunt Lidia is framed for murder. Aleksandra is determined to clear her aunt’s name and learn more about her family’s unique history in the process.
Denise Swanson is a New York Times bestselling author who is well known for her Scumble River Mysteries. However, she also has a paranormal cozy series. The first novel in that series is A Call to Charms. To escape an ex-boyfriend, Lexie Green, leaves her life in the city behind to live under a new name in a small Kansas town only to discover her mystical inheritance left to her by an aunt she never knew. Speaking of relatives she never knew that includes her father. Lexie learns that he was murdered in the town years ago. Now, she’s determined to find her father’s killer and learn more about herself in the process.
Fairies in a cozy? Yep, that is a theme in Daryl Wood Gerber’s charming novel A Sprinkling of Murder. Courtney Kelly has always love fairies and as an adult has opened a fairy garden business and teashop in Carmel, California called Open Your Imagination. The business is doing well until she finds the body of a neighboring business owner in the garden of her shop. In the police’s eyes, Courtney is suspect number one. She has to solve the murder to clear her good name, and she finds help in an unexpected source, Fiona, a real fairy who lives in the garden.
Brownies and Broomsticks is the first novel in New York Times bestselling author Bailey Cates’s long-running Magical Bakery Mystery Series. In this first installment, Katie Lightfoot moves from Ohio to Savannah, Georgia to help her aunt and uncle open a bakery in the downtown area. The new shop is called Honeybee Bakery, and Katie grows concerned when she notices her aunt adding unexpected herbs to her recipes. What Katie learns is shocking. The herbs are spells and her aunt is a witch. It’s a lot for Katie to digest. She isn’t given much time to do that because a curmudgeonly neighbor is killed right on the bakery’s doorstep, and Katie’s uncle is the prime suspect in the murder. Now Katie and her aunt have to use their magic and their wits to solve the crime.
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