To escape the world around me, I’ve always turned to mysteries. When things feel chaotic, I crave order—I want the bad guy to be caught, the evil contained, and the community to thrive in the end. Bonus points if the murder victim isn’t someone I have to feel too sorry for, the amateur sleuth is someone I love immediately, and there’s a hot detective or an ex who got away—or both!
I needed that kind of escape when, a few years ago, I left an academic career to write intensive journalism about refugee resettlement in the United States and genocide in Syria and Myanmar. The reporting was personal and intimate and searing, and my brain couldn’t settle at night—until I turned back to mysteries. There were several books, often series, that I could trust to really help me escape to a different world; I asked a lot of these books, to help me leave behind the trauma I was writing about, and they delivered every single time.
We’d define most of the books on this list as cozy mysteries, though some have a more heists than murder. My favorites are what I think we should call “ro-mysteries,” like romantasy—a mix of romance and mystery that keeps the best elements both genres. That’s how I define my debut novel which I’m writing under the not-so-secret pseudonym, Jess Cannon (since these books are the polar opposite of the award-winning nonfiction I’ve written under my own name, Jessica Goudeau, in the past).
In between edits on my last nonfiction book, I decided I needed more joy in my life and wanted a new challenge, so I started imagining what would happen if my neighborhood’s dueling Facebook pages, where people argue vehemently about fireworks every Fourth of July, tipped over into murder. The result was A Zoom with a View, a ro-mystery about Leo Holloway, a failed academic who moves back home to the fictional town of Blue Oak, Texas to find an explosive Fourth of July parade (literally), a hot detective, a matchmaking best friend, an ex-boyfriend who has only gotten cuter, a mother hiding secrets under all her Aquanet—and a dead body.
I wrote the first book in the Blue Oak mystery series to provide you with a much-needed escape in increasingly tumultuous times, just like these other books gave me.
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Vivien Chien, Noodle Shop series
An extraordinary twelve books in, amateur sleuth Lana Lee has been solving murders in and around Asia Village, where she helps out at her family’s restaurant, Ho-Lee Noodle House. I love revisiting these shops and their hilarious, lovable owners even as murder after murder rocks their little community.
The food puns in the titles are delightful, and the culinary adventures are only outpaced by the murders solved by Lana and Detective Adam Trudeau. I only wish I could actually eat a bowl of Ho-Lee noodles.
Mia Manansala, Tita Rosie’s Kitchen series
This is another series that left me perpetually hungry as Lila Macapagal moves back home after a terrible breakup to help in the kitchen of her aunt Rosie. The murders over the six books are intriguing and witty, and the romance element as Lila finds love is emotionally satisfying.
But even more satisfying is the fact that Lila’s great love is with her family, meddling aunts and all, and the hometown she once thought she couldn’t get out of fast enough and now can’t imagine leaving.
Jesse Q. Sutanto, Dial A for Auntie series
Meddling aunts abound in Sutanto’s series: Meddelin Chan did not intend for her aunties to get involved after she kills her blind date, but they do and shenanigans ensue. I loved these aunties with my whole heart and only wish I had this level of help-thwarting from my own aunts.
They are brilliant, wise, and hilarious and just when I thought things couldn’t get more complicated—the aunts get involved again.
Elle Cosimano, Finlay Donovan series
Cosimano had me at the tagline for the first book, Finlay Donovan Is Killing It: “Most moms are ready to kill someone by eight thirty A.M. on any given morning….”
I snatched the book off of the bookstore table and devoured it within two days. Finlay’s murder-y shenanigans are hilarious and the love triangle puts it squarely in the ro-mystery category, but everyone knows the relationships at the heart of the books are Finlay’s with her kids and her best friend/nanny/partner-in-crime, Vero Rodriquez.
Elise Bryant, It’s Elementary and The Game Is Afoot
When I first read about the drama between Mavis Miller and the PTA moms at her kid’s elementary school, I had to look up whether Elise Bryant lives in my Austin neighborhood; she does not, but the drama hit so close to home, it made the books even more delightful. Mavis manages a life in shambles and being class mom and solving murder with aplomb—the only thing I could ask of these books is more in the series.
I’m heartbroken there aren’t more planned because I need to know what happens next to Mavis.
Nina Simon, Mother-Daughter Murder Night
Speaking of murderous relations! A mother, daughter, and grandmother have to figure out how solve a crime and live together (which is much harder) after the grandmother’s cancer diagnosis. Simon wrote the book as she was caring for her own mother with cancer, and the fictional relationships might be different, but the very real dynamics between women across generations is so relatable.
This was another one I just couldn’t put down and I’m on pins and needles for her next book, My Sister Is Going to Kill Me.
Gigi Pandian, Secret Staircase Mysteries
Gigi Pandian’s mind is a twisted, wonderful place. Tempest Raj takes us on the kinds of locked-room adventures that make me feel like a kid again, trying to suss out clues from sliding bookcases, complex locks, and reading nooks that shouldn’t exist. I can’t even describe this series, other than to say it’s as smart as it is fun.
The complex family dynamics over several books only deepens the real mystery, which is: how do you sustain a healthy relationship with a family you love as much as you want to murder them?
Deanna Raybourn’s Veronica Speedwell series and Killers of a Certain Age
Is it cheating to say every book that Raybourne has ever written? These two series were so immersive and I love them for different reasons. Raybourne has an uncanny ability to understand the voice of her characters, and those voices live in the readers’ minds long after the books are finished.
For the Veronica Speedwell books, what I loved was an intrepid, confident woman who sometimes lied even to herself and had to learn how to trust her own abilities and the people around her while solving crimes in Victorian London. And Killers of a Certain Age grapples with the complex, uncertain futures many women face—and the reality that the people they can always trust are their lifelong friends, even if those friends are assassins.
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