Book note: Recipe for Murder, by Lisa Harris

Recipe for Murder by Lisa Harris (Heartsong Presents Mysteries, Barbour Publishing, 2008) is an enjoyable cozy mystery featuring a couple of lively older sleuths (amateurs, and rookies at that). Widow Pricilla Crumb is in her 60s, and cooking at her unmarried son's hunting lodge in Colorado. She invites widower Max Summers, an old friend of hers, and his daughter to the lodge, because she wants to play matchmaker between her son and Max's daughter. Meanwhile Max, retired after 35 years in the Air Force, is becoming strangely attractive...

Pricilla is a busybody, but a responsible one. She even confesses to murder - when she thinks she killed somebody accidentally with food poisoning after perhaps not checking an expiration date. When she finds that she's innocent, and finds that she doesn't have a lot of faith in local law enforcement, she decides to uncover the killer. Max, thinking she's in over her head (a good guess), joins forces with her.

The book is full of humor. On top of that, Max and Pricilla and their children remind me of people I know. (How nice, to have regular folks, and families, in a mystery.)

Pricilla is a mystery fan, which adds to the fun.

Lisa Harris has a website here. She blogs at Heart of Africa.

There's an interview with her here, in which she talks about Recipe for Murder, and its evolution. It sounds like there are sequels waiting in the wings. Oh, good.

I am on a cozy mystery reading jag, and so is a friend of mine. Any suggestions on what to add to our to-be-read stacks? (If you're also looking for suggestions, a reader left several recommendations in the comments at this post.)

Book note: Mysterious Incidents at Lone Rock, by Rajendra Pillai

Believe it or not, I just read a Christian murder mystery starring a Hindu policeman. And liked it, overall.

The first part of Mysterious Incidents at Lone Rock (Heartsong Presents, 2008), I didn't think I was going to like it, but it picked up as it went, and turned into a pretty good little cozy, all in all, plus I found myself rather liking the central sleuth, Chintamoni Roy, better known as Chinni.

So, I went in search of information on whether this was perhaps the launch of a new series, all the more so because the prologue has the narrator (a Professor Richard Harrison) claiming that this case happened over thirty years ago, and that Chinni was 'a new friend at the time'.

So far, so good.

Then I find that the Heartsong mysteries are only available through their book club, which only sends out new releases (as far as I can tell), which means (as far as I know) that to get your hands on a copy of this title you're going to have to find a used book. (Like I did.)

Yargh. I dislike flash in the pan publishing. :(

Anyway, this is a cozy in the true sense. The language is clean, there isn't gore, there are some nice red herrings, there are mysteries within the mystery, and, tah dah, we even have our hero having everyone assemble on the premises for the dramatic unveiling of the solution.

Chinni is a decent and considerate man. If he unearths something that would probably cause 'disharmony,' he doesn't use it if he doesn't need to. At the same time, he doesn't flinch from asking anything he thinks needs asking. And, just to make it more fun, he thinks crime solving is much like algebra, and should be approached as such (to the occasional distress of his more conventional colleagues).

Here's hoping Chinni Roy gets another case. And a publisher that will keep the book in print for people to discover in due time.

(And - is this too much to ask? - a publisher that would make the books available sooner or later to bookstores, because, you know, bookstores have trouble finding good, clean mysteries to stock these days.)

Speaking of authentic cozies, feel free to recommend some in the comments, particularly if you know of any that have been recently published. I am so tired of bad language and worse attitudes in contemporary fiction, and I love to encourage the nice guys, both secular and Christian.

NB

I was reading the mystery Have His Carcase by Dorothy Sayers this week, and in a list drawn up by the sleuths for 'Things to Be Noted' and 'Things to be Done', I kept running into the initials N.B.

Since N.B. always came toward the end of each note, setting off the last thing mentioned in each section, I thought at first that it was a variation on P.S., but after a while I decided that didn't work, so I abandoned the novel and went to my primary dictionary, which informs me that NB (the periods seem to have been dropped over the years) means "note well" and is derived from the Latin nota bene.

Ooh, this could be useful. I wonder why it's not in common use?

P.S. As far as the mystery goes, Have His Carcase is rather more gruesome, complicated, and clever than I wanted. Being by Sayers, it has a great deal of wit and substance, but it is decidedly more graphic in places than you might expect from a British mystery from 1932. Overall it's pretty good, and it places it heads toward brilliant, but it has a high enough "yuck" factor to take it off my "recommend it to everybody" list. If you like codes and ciphers, though, toward the end of the book it has some rather detailed lessons in making and breaking a certain type of cipher.

And, yes, Lord Peter Wimsey fans, this is one of those books starring that hero and Miss Vane, where he knows he's in love with her, but she isn't sure what she thinks about him.

Update: Hmmm. Now that I know about NB (or N.B.), I suppose it's going to pop up all over the place, and I'll feel silly for not knowing about it already. Exhibit A: see this multi-book book review post, specifically the review for Girls Gone Mild: Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It's Not Bad to Be Good by Wendy Shalit.