Spiked Punch (Maddie Sparks Mystery Series)
Cozy Mystery
1st in Series
Setting – Upstate New York
Camel Press (November 14, 2023)
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 248 pages

Synopsis

On the other side of seventy, Maddie Sparks decides to spice up her life by changing her writing interests from cozy mysteries to romance. She also determines her appearance should reflect this transformation in her writing career. A sassy new haircut and more fashionable clothes complete the newer Maddie Sparks. Before she can begin this new chapter in her life, a stabbing death in the quiet country village she has made her home shocks the town’s residents.

When her son is accused of the murder, Maddie and the acting county sheriff come together to find the real killer. Their relationship soon blooms into more than one of shared determination to solve the murder. As they enjoy a hike in a nearby park, someone shoots the sheriff, barely missing Maddie. Another killer could be loose in the area, and the person may be closer to Maddie than she realizes. Maddie discovers parts of herself she didn’t know existed: real life romance with the sheriff, a talent for sleuthing and room in her life for a fuzzy, orange cat named “Spike.” This recent lease on life may be more exciting and more dangerous than Maddie expects.

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Guest Post

Why I love cozy mysteries

Lesley A. Diehl

Cozy mysteries are almost part of my DNA. I began reading the genre in grade school when I discovered Nancy Drew and the Dana girls as well as Cherry Ames. These tales were not labeled as cozies, but that is what we’d call them today. They subscribe to the same guidelines of our contemporary cozy mystery. I graduated from these books, mainly written for a younger audience to Agatha Christie who employed the same approach to the mystery story. But what about them captures my attention?

There are three aspects of the cozy mystery that appeal to me: the characters, the setting, and the puzzle.

Characters, characters, characters

Some argue that cozy mysteries are character driven, but that’s not the entire story. It’s the kind of characters that inhabit the cozy mystery that is significant. Readers often find themselves in the cozy protagonist. She is usually a female, someone whom we feel we know immediately, a friend, a relative, maybe ourselves. We admire her because she has courage. She takes the kind of action we might wish we could take. She’s curious and possesses the ability to ask snoopy questions without overly offending people who might have something to hide. The reader trusts her and understands that so do the people she interacts with. While she might trespass on territory that is dangerous, she is smart enough to finagle her way out of tight situations. She’s a brilliant detective without the license or the uniform.

She has friends and family who love and support her, sometimes not without reservations. The author usually provides an entire cast of characters we want to know better. The villain is usually someone who is also part of the community in which the protagonist lives. Along with the protagonist, readers find reasons to trust as well as doubt all the suspects in the story.

The characters in a cozy mystery are reasonable, i.e., people like those you already know, no superheroes, serial murderers, corporate executives and usually no high-ranking politicians. They are just folks you live among, the mayor, a librarian, a teacher, business owner, retiree next door, e.g., folks from a community setting or people who have reason to come into that setting.

A small place

It doesn’t have to be a village, but cozy mysteries are usually set in a small geographical area that is defined by the people living within it having knowledge and interaction with each other. It could be, for example, a neighborhood in a larger city. The setting allows the protagonist access to sources of information and individuals known to her. People talk with those they know and reveal by way of body language and seemingly unimportant information, evidence pertinent to solving a murder.

If writing a cozy mystery series, the writer must find a way to bring characters into the setting in order to provide likely suspects.  For example, the town might be a seasonal tourist attraction, or a community close to a city where those working in the city live. Venues close to the community like museums, festivals, and summer playhouses provide settings for community members to mingle with those outside their area, an opportunity for murder or for a murderer less intimately attached to the community. Another way writers handle an overabundance of murders in a small village is to move one of the books in the series to a new location, e.g., a vacation spot, for a few weeks or longer.

I like to take places where I’ve lived and make them the basis for a setting. All of these locales have been small towns. I prefer to change aspects of the community such as street layouts, names of businesses and town names so I can freely play with where events occur in the village.

Who did it?

I love writing and reading cozy mysteries because the puzzle, whodunit, is cognitively fascinating. Along with the protagonist being someone like the reader, the protagonist shows her intellectual faculties by lacing clues together to finally reveal the killer. It’s challenging, it’s fun, and it keeps the reader’s mind sharp. The reader becomes a kind of silent partner with the protagonist, sometimes seeing a clue before she does, sometimes missing the significance of it altogether and usually being happily surprised when the protagonist makes whole all those pieces of information spread tantalizingly throughout the book.

Solving the crime is much more satisfying than doing a crossword or other word puzzle because the clues and the solution have both emotional and cognitive context. Satisfied you saw that clue and what it meant in determining the identity of the killer? Or did you miss that one? What a clever gal our protagonist is to see the lie for what it was. In the cozy mystery the reader cheers for the protagonist when she uncovers the killer. And she always uncovers the killer. The world of the cozy mystery is a just world where satisfaction is emotional, intellectual and legal. It’s the kind of world we need to live in if only in the escape of the novel.

In essence the cozy mystery leaves the reader with a sense of things being set right. These mysteries are a pleasure to read as well as a pleasure to write. Add a bit of humor as I do in Spiked Punch and there’s the added delight of a good laugh along the way. So sit back with a cuppa and enjoy the read!

About the Author

Cows, Lesley learned growing up on a farm, have a twisted sense of humor. They chased her when she went to the field to herd them in for milking, and one ate the lovely red mitten her grandmother knitted for her. Determining that agriculture wasn’t a good career choice, instead, she uses her country roots and her training as a psychologist to concoct stories designed to make people laugh in the face of murder. “A good chuckle,” says Lesley,” keeps us emotionally well-oiled long into our old age.” She is the author of the Eve Appel mysteries from Camel Press, as well as several cozy mystery series and numerous short stories.

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