The beginning of autumn always makes me want to curl up with a good book and a steaming mug of tea and nothing is cozier to me than a cozy mystery. With protagonists ranging from “your average 30 something whose life has been upended and must return home” to (usually) “single women who inherit mysterious old houses or bookstores,” the tropes found in cozies are numerous and predictable – it’s what makes them cozy! This season however, I’m going to take my chances with some not-so-nice-but-still-compelling, murderous elderly ladies and septuagenarians with a passion for solving crime. Here’s some recent releases that will find good company next to Miss Marple on my TBR pile this cozy season.
If you loved the movie Red, Killers of a Certain Age by Deanna Raybourn is for you. After giving 40 years of their lives to a secret organization of assassins called The Museum, four women are sent packing on a luxury trip to mark their well-deserved retirement. But when one of their own starts targeting them, they’ll show the Museum exactly what it means to be old-school.
Best-selling South Korean author Gu Byeong-Mo made her English language debut in The Old Woman With The Knife, which is about Hornclaw, a highly competent 65-year-old assassin hoping to cash out and retire. However, she makes the mistake of getting too close to a doctor and his family after a chance encounter. In her line of work, there’s always consequences for such connections and this time her very life is at stake.
In An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good, veteran Swedish crime writer Helene Tursten introduces us to Maud, an 88-year-old woman who lives alone, has no family and likes it that way. Over the course of the short stories collected here and the equally quaint follow-up An Elderly Lady Must Not Be Crossed, you’ll find it hard not to root for the only slightly murderous Maud.
Following in the cozy vein of the smash-hit Dial A for Aunties, Jesse Q. Sutanto’s Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers focuses on an elderly Chinese woman who finds a dead body in her teashop one day. Believing she can do a better job than the police, she swipes a piece of evidence from the scene, knowing the killer will come back for it. What she doesn’t anticipate is starting to care for the patrons of her now bustling tea shop, potential murderer included.
Forget the Senior Center – the seniors in Robert Thorogood’s The Marlow Murder Club and Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club are more interested in solving murders than playing pinochle. In the Marlow Murder club, a 77-year-old woman witnesses a brutal murder while swimming in the Thames and brings together an odd assortment of fellow sleuths to solve the murder, but not before a second body is found. In The Thursday Murder Club, a group of septuagenarians meet regularly to discuss unsolved crimes. When a local developer is found dead, the group has a real case to solve. Both books are the first in their respective series.
~ posted by V.
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