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Margaret Ann and the Reckoning
In Margaret Ann and the Reckoning, Cindy Cortez Prieto drops readers into a cemetery where death is not an ending so much as a strange continuation: Margaret Ann, a dead girl living among other spirits with her grandpa and her friends Hazel and Marco, investigates the suspicious death of wealthy Florence Mason while also facing the return of the Gazer, a malevolent force hunting her essence. The book braids a murder puzzle with a supernatural struggle, and that combination gives it an unusually lively pulse for a ghost story aimed at younger readers.
What I liked most was the book’s tonal oddity in the best sense. It can be eerie, then playful, then unexpectedly tender. Prieto has a real affection for her cemetery world, and that affection keeps the novel from turning merely grim. I liked the way the dead still squabble, joke, investigate, worry, and form makeshift family bonds. That emotional logic matters more than strict realism here, and it gives the story a homespun sincerity that I found winning. Hazel, in particular, adds warmth, and Margaret Ann’s mix of bravery, irritation, curiosity, and vulnerability keeps the novel from feeling embalmed in sweetness.
I also appreciated the novel’s willingness to be melodramatic. The wicked voices, the family greed, the spectral menace, the sense that a child detective can step straight from library research into metaphysical peril, none of it is shy. Sometimes the prose is a little blunt, and some scenes land with more earnestness than polish, but there is energy in that directness. The book doesn’t smirk at its own haunted premise. It commits. And because it commits, the spooky set pieces and emotional beats have a kind of old-fashioned crackle. And that makes the story vivid.
I would hand this to middle-grade and young YA readers who enjoy paranormal mystery, ghost adventure, supernatural suspense, cemetery fiction, and kid-detective stories with a strong streak of heart. Readers who like Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book may recognize a similar fascination with childhood among the dead, though Prieto’s novel is less lyrical and more openly earnest, with a warmer, more familial glow. This is a spooky-hearted mystery that prefers soul to slickness, and that is its own kind of magic.
Pages: 143 | ASIN : B0GQ6V5D7P
Hellcat
Hellcat opens like a trap snapping shut and hardly loosens its grip from there. Gail Meath drops us into 1923 Manhattan with a woman already stalking a man she believes is about to murder his wife, then braids that lethal prologue into a larger mystery involving Jax Diamond, his newlywed life with Laura, a string of gangland killings marked by lipstick and black roses, and the aching disappearance of Riley O’Shea. What I found especially satisfying is the way the book keeps shifting registers without losing its footing. It can move from an elevator-shaft death at the Plaza to a World Series sequence where Laura’s shaky rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” gives way to a genuinely stirring, stadium-silencing “Star-Spangled Banner,” and somehow both scenes belong to the same emotional weather. The result is a mystery that feels busy in the best sense, full of motion, personality, and period texture.
I enjoyed the novel’s emotional undercurrent, which is stronger and sadder than the jaunty setup first suggests. Jax’s jealousy over Vince Vitali’s flowers and his rough-edged honeymoon banter give the book a screwball warmth, but the missing-person thread lends it real ache, especially once Maureen O’Shea speaks about a marriage so steadfast that her husband would have “fought his way through hellfire” to get home. That conviction gives the whole investigation a pulse. Later, when Jax carefully coaxes the amnesiac Riley back toward himself with talk of a house, a yard, and finally Maureen’s name, the novel lands on something unexpectedly tender. Beneath the wisecracks, the book is interested in loyalty, memory, and the terrible distance between being alive and being able to return to the people who love you.
Death Row Dotty is not treated as a cheap gimmick. She becomes a way for the novel to ask what people do when institutions fail, when grief curdles into purpose, and when vengeance starts to look like justice from far enough away. There’s even a moment when public sympathy for her grows, and that complicates the moral atmosphere nicely. Meath’s writing isn’t trying to be hard-boiled in a joyless, imitative way. It’s more generous than that. The dialogue has bounce, the pacing is brisk, and the historical details, from the nightclubs to the library work to the underworld gossip, are woven in with an easy hand. The plotting can feel a little crowded, and the sheer number of moving parts asks for some patience, but I found that abundance part of the charm. The book wants romance, danger, sentiment, spectacle, family drama, and a fair bit of theatrical flair, and more often than not, it earns all of it.
Hellcat is entertaining. What I expected to be a stylish period mystery turned out to have a bruised heart, and that heart is what gave the story its staying power for me. I’d recommend it most to readers who like historical mysteries with strong relationship dynamics, a touch of melodrama, and a detective story that makes room for grief, devotion, and moral ambiguity alongside its murders and clues. It’s a lively, emotionally textured mystery, and I closed it feeling that it had more on its mind than a simple whodunit.
Pages: 218 | ASIN : B0F3JGS9KH
Identity
Identity opens as a missing-person mystery on the California coast and then keeps slipping its skin. Author A.J. Thibault begins with two teenage boys vanishing after a brutal confrontation on the beach, then widens the story to include Lakeland, a girl with blackouts and a disquieting sense of estrangement from her own life, and Detectives Esposito and Shangri-La, who investigate the town’s accumulating oddities. What follows is part murder investigation, part transformation tale, part meditation on gender, selfhood, and the unnerving possibility that the body may not be the final authority on who a person is.
I admired the book most when it refused to behave like a tidy procedural. It has the scaffolding of a thriller, but its real engine is yearning: Tommy’s anguish, Lakeland’s dissociation, Shangri-La’s precision, even the town’s uneasy performance of tolerance. I felt, while reading, that Thibault was less interested in merely solving a crime than in asking what happens when identity becomes porous, when desire, shame, memory, and metamorphosis begin to trade clothes in the dark. That ambition gives the novel an electric strangeness. The prose is almost fever-dreamed, but that volatility suits a story about people who are not stable in the ways the world demands.
Some scenes are blunt where they might have been sharper, and some thematic material is delivered with a hammer rather than a scalpel. But I never felt the novel was timid. It courts melodrama and occasionally earns it. More importantly, it has a genuine pulse of obsession running through it, and I would rather read a novel that overreaches than one that glides by on polish alone. Identity is messy, but it is a mess in the old Gothic sense, charged, moonlit, and full of psychic weather.
I would hand this book to readers of queer fiction, supernatural mystery, psychological thriller, metamorphosis horror, and dark coming-of-age stories, especially those who like their genre boundaries blurred rather than fenced. Readers who gravitate toward the uncanny earnestness of Alice Hoffman or the body-and-self unease found in some of Caitlín R. Kiernan’s work may find something here to savor, though Thibault is more raw than either. This feels best suited to adventurous readers willing to follow a strange book into stranger woods.
Pages: 430 | ASIN : B0GLL6S61C
Drawn Into The Clash of Cultures
Murder on the Set centers around an amateur sleuth on a movie set in Puerto Vallarta as she dives headfirst into a double murder investigation. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
Murder on the Set is the fourth book in the Amanda Pennyworth Mystery Series. I was inspired to use the idea of a visiting movie company when I recalled a very odd film, NIGHT OF THE IGUANA, based on a Tennessee Williams play and shot in Puerto Vallarta in the early 1960s. The invasion of Hollywood movie stars, a crew of extras, producers and directors was an enormously disruptive event and the perfect setting to stage a murder mystery. There was not only the expected glamour, but the possibility of writing about outsized personalities and the clash between the various cultures: tourists, American expats, local Mexicans, the police, and, of course, Amanda herself.
What do you think makes Amanda different from other mystery protagonists?
Amanda Pennyworth is different, I suppose, because she isn’t really a detective or even an amateur sleuth, but rather, someone who, because of her profession as American Consul to Puerto Vallarta, is inevitably drawn into the clash of cultures, and the troubles that Americans bring on themselves when they visit a foreign country. This means that she stands at the center of everything that happens, whether she wants to or not. What else makes her different is that she must answer to so many different voices: the Foreign Service, The American ambassador, the Expat Community, tourists, the local police, and, of course, to her own ambition.
How much research did you do into film production and Hollywood culture?
I tried to make sure that I understood the various functions of movie makers–the stars, writers, producers and directors and, of course, the extras. I also watched the old film Night of the Iguana, which gave me some ideas for names and characters.
Is there another installment of the Amanda Pennyworth Mystery Series planned? Where will it take readers?
Yes, there will be another Amanda Pennyworth Mystery forthcoming. Again, it will be set in Puerto Vallarta which seems to me to be the perfect situation to place a series that explores the clash of cultures and customs as well as the intrigues of a mystery.
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Almost immediately, an expat who volunteered as an extra on the film is brutally murdered. Then his wife is bludgeoned to death. The police are intimidated and baffled by the Hollywood crew, and Amanda is called upon to help find the killer.
But her own life is complicated: her assignment in this beautiful resort city is ending, and her next posting may be in a dangerous Middle Eastern zone. Everything is suddenly in turmoil. Amanda must catch the killer before he strikes again—and decide what path her career and future will take. All of her ingenuity and daring may not be enough.
Libraries Preserve Stories
Dead Drop in Lily Rock follows a newly unhoused hiker as a Fourth of July stopover turns into an investigation of a murder at a library where classic-book devotion and small-town secrets lead to an interesting culprit. What sparked the idea to make a library the crime scene, and to make books function as evidence?
A Little Free Library is one of the last places we’d expect violence. Quiet, ordered, built on the assumption that knowledge is shared freely and stories are preserved with care. That sense of safety is exactly what made it the right crime scene.
Mysteries disrupt what feels stable in a community. A murder in a back alley is tragic. A murder at a Little Free Library is personal. It unsettles a town’s sense of who it is. It forces people to ask not just who did this, but why would anyone violate a community service devoted to ideas?
In Dead Drop in Lily Rock, books aren’t props. They’re catalysts. They carry history, ideology, memory, and sometimes controversy. A bookmark can signal allegiance. A marginal note can reveal motive. A banned title tucked into a Little Free Library can expose fault lines in a community that otherwise prides itself on harmony.
I was also drawn to the metaphor: Libraries preserve stories. A murder investigation uncovers one.
In Lily Rock, stories matter. So when something violent interrupts that space, the truth has to be found between the lines.
Officer Janis “Jets” Jets’s sarcasm is practically a climate. How did her voice develop, and what role does she play in shaping the tone of the series?
Janis’s voice developed before Avery arrived in Lily Rock. She first appeared in the original Welcome to Lily Rock Mystery series, sent as an undercover cop during the holiday season. Once Olivia arrives, in Getaway Death, Janis becomes the counterweight to Olivia’s empathy. When Olivia leans into intuition and connection, Janis leans into process and proof.
Her sarcasm grew organically out of that tension.
Small-town policing is intimate. You’re not just enforcing laws, you’re dealing with neighbors, gossip, fragile reputations, and people you’ve known since high school. Sarcasm became Janis’s armor. It’s how she maintains authority without becoming brittle. It’s how she keeps her footing when emotion threatens to swamp the facts.
In the Avery Denning books, Janis serves as tonal ballast. Avery feels the world deeply—animals, shifts in energy, subtle emotional undercurrents. Janis cuts through that with sharp clarity. Her voice sharpens scenes, prevents sentimentality, and keeps the series from floating away into pure intuition.
If Avery listens to crows, Janis reads warrants and sometimes invents her own to make a point.
Lily Rock feels authentic down to Mayor Maguire’s bookmark celebrity. What’s your process for inventing those hyper-specific town details without overloading the story?
I treat Lily Rock like a real town with zoning restrictions and a Chamber of Commerce. Before I write, I quietly ask the following:
What would this town brag about?
What would they put on a postcard?
What would they argue about at the hardware store?
Mayor Maguire, the labradoodle with local celebrity status, began as a small detail. But once he existed, the town responded to him. Someone would absolutely put him on bookmarks. Someone else would roll their eyes about it. Others called him psychic without knowing why. That’s how details become an ecosystem rather than decoration.
The key to avoiding overload is restraint. I think of world-building like seasoning. The reader doesn’t need the entire spice rack. They need the right pinch at the right moment.
A Little Free Library doesn’t need a full architectural history. It needs one crooked hinge, a banned book tucked inside, and a note written in a hurried hand.
Specificity creates authenticity. Selectivity creates readability.
How do you design clue trails so they feel fair and still deliver a snap of surprise?
For me, fairness is sacred to a mystery.
I design clues in three layers:
- Visible clues – The reader sees exactly what the sleuth sees. No hidden evidence withheld unfairly.
- Misinterpreted clues – These are the magic ones. The clue is accurate, but its meaning is slightly bent by context emotion, or assumption.
- Quiet clues – Small, almost throwaway details that only gain weight later.
The “snap” of surprise happens when a reader realizes: Oh. That was there the whole time.
I avoid surprise for shock’s sake. Instead, I aim for inevitability disguised as misdirection. The ending should feel both startling and earned.
And perhaps most important: I design suspect motivations before I design mechanics. If the emotional truth tracks, the clue trail will feel organic.
Mystery, at its heart, isn’t about trickery.
It’s about perception.
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Instead, she finds a murdered woman at the foot of a Little Free Library.
Arriving in the mountain town of Lily Rock for the Fourth of July weekend, Avery plans to rent a room from Stella Rawlins—a friendly local known for her love of books and quiet acts of defiance. When Stella is killed by a sabotaged firecracker hidden inside her library, Avery becomes the discovery witness… and an immediate suspect.
With parades planned and tensions rising over which books belong on public shelves, Lily Rock’s only police officer, Janis Jets, has her hands full. Olivia Greer, a constabulary consultant with a gift for listening, offers Avery a place to stay—and a chance to explain how she ended up at the scene of the crime.
As Avery begins asking questions, she uncovers a secret network of Little Free Libraries, anonymous religious threats tucked inside children’s books, and a second shocking death that turns the case deeply personal. Along the way, she reconnects with Brad May—older, steadier, and quietly trying to make a better life—awakening feelings Avery thought she’d left behind.
Soon it’s clear this isn’t just about books.
It’s about control, belonging, and who gets to decide which stories are worth protecting.
Armed with sharp instincts, a knack for noticing what others miss, and the growing realization that her outsider status may be her greatest strength, Avery steps into a role she never expected: amateur sleuth.
But in Lily Rock, asking the wrong questions can be deadly…
and staying might mean risking her heart as well as her life.
Dead Drop in Lily Rock launches a new mystery series set in the beloved Lily Rock universe—perfect for readers who love small-town whodunits, strong women sleuths, and cozy mysteries with heart.
Dead Drop in Lily Rock
Bonnie Hardy’s Dead Drop in Lily Rock drops me into town alongside Avery Denning, sunburned, scruffy, and freshly unmoored after a Palos Verdes fire burns her house down and shoves her onto the Pacific Crest Trail. She’s looking for nothing more complicated than a safe bed for the Fourth of July weekend when she collides with Stella Rawlins’s death at a bright-blue little free library: a rustle in the hedge, a flash, the sulfur bite of a firecracker, and then Stella’s terrible, sudden nothing. What starts as shock hardens into a question Avery can’t put down, especially once the town’s book-obsessed social web (including the Switchback Syndicate, devotees of “older classics” for new readers) begins to look less quaint and more… curated.
I enjoyed the book’s comfort-layering: the setting is cozy, like a mug you can wrap both hands around. Hardy lets the town charm do real work, Mayor Maguire isn’t just “a dog,” he’s a small-time celebrity labradoodle politician on Stella’s bookmarks, a detail so specific it feels lived-in rather than staged. And the dialogue has bite. Officer Janis “Jets” Jets is the kind of cop who’d rather arrest you, eat lunch, and get back to crowd control than listen to anyone emote, and her sarcasm becomes its own local weather system. I was smiling at the brusque tenderness underneath it all: people in Lily Rock needle each other the way families do, affection disguised as a shove.
The second thing that hooked me was how the book treats “a book” not as decoration but as evidence. The recurring children’s title Are You My Mother? isn’t a cute motif. It’s a bruise Stella keeps being forced to touch, tied to adoption and a past she thought she’d settled. When Avery starts finding multiple copies scattered through Stella’s house, it lands as genuinely eerie, like someone has been trying to speak in a language made of paper and repetition. The late-stage revelations snap satisfyingly into place: surveillance footage, a sabotaged “shower deck,” and, finally, an unambiguous face in the after-flash, Cordelia Pratt, firecracker in hand. It’s a clean kind of catharsis, made sharper because the motive lives in obsession and secrecy rather than moustache-twirling villainy.
If you like your mysteries with warmth in the margins, and you don’t mind a little darkness under the bunting, this one’s for you: cozy mystery, small-town mystery, amateur sleuth, bookish mystery, murder mystery. The series framing is right up front (Avery Denning, Lily Rock, Book 1), so it reads like an invitation as much as a standalone case. In spirit, it sits closer to an Agatha Christie village puzzle than a gritty procedural. Dead Drop in Lily Rock shows that a murder mystery can be comforting when the clues feel human, and the town feels real.
Pages: 302 | ISBN: 1954995520
