I like unusual cozies – mysteries that push the boundaries of the normal canon of the genre, while still being cozy. I was at Cozy Con (a conference for cozy writers) in St. Paul a few years back, and stumbled on this book in a bookstore there.
The moment I started it, I couldn’t put it down! There’s something wonderful about a forest communities of animals, where the sheriff is a bear, and the amateur sleuth is a journalist vixen, with her best friend being a bookstore-owning raven.
These books are my favorite escape into a world where all animals in the forest live together, work together, and occasionally, murder each other. There are five books in the series, with the sixth coming in October. Trust me on this, you’ll love Shady Hollow!
Shady Hollow Mystery #1
The first book in the Shady Hollow series, in which we are introduced to the village of Shady Hollow, a place where woodland creatures live together in harmony—until a curmudgeonly toad turns up dead and the local reporter has to solve the case.
Reporter Vera Vixen is a relative newcomer to Shady Hollow. The fox has a nose for news, so when she catches wind that the death might be a murder, she resolves to get to the bottom of the case, no matter where it leads. As she stirs up still waters, the fox exposes more than one mystery, and discovers that additional lives are in jeopardy.
Vera finds more to this town than she ever suspected. It seems someone in the Hollow will do anything to keep her from solving the murder, and soon it will take all of Vera’s cunning and quickness to crack the case.
Mystery Amateur Sleuth | Mystery Cozy [Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, On Sale: January 25, 2022, Trade Size / e-Book , ISBN: 9780593315712 / eISBN: 9780385542449]
Juneau Black is the pen name of authors Jocelyn Cole and Sharon Nagel. They share a love of excellent bookshops, fine cheeses, and a good murder (in fictional form only). Though they are two separate people, if you ask either of them a question about their childhood, you are likely to get the same answer. This is a little unnerving for any number of reasons.
Stories all start somewhere! We owe huge thanks to the city of Milwaukee’s fantastic book scene, from our former employer Boswell Book Company to the journalists who work hard to cover local news and events in the way they deserve.
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