A Bean to Die For (A Coffee Lover’s Mystery)
Cozy Mystery
4th in Series
Setting – Florida
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Crooked Lane Books (January 9, 2024)
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 288 pages

Synopsis

Perfect for fans of Cleo Coyle and Lucy Burdette, reporter-turned-barista Lana Lewis is back on the case when a body is dug up in the community garden.

Lana Lewis is brewing up new concoctions at Perkatory, a popular café in Devil’s Beach, when she decides she wants to try her hand at growing her own coffee. She secures a gardening plot in the community garden, thanks to her father and the garden’s owner, Darla. Darla’s list of rules is long, but that doesn’t stop someone from leaving Jack Daggett’s body amongst the gardening plots.

Jack, an environmental activist, had been banned from the garden previously, because of his many fights with Darla about organic produce. Lana promises her boyfriend, police chief Noah, that she’s going to stay out of this case, having been too involved in previous cases. But when she learns that Jack died from an accidental overdose, and Darla is the top suspect because of her shady past, Lana can’t help but poke around in an attempt to clear Darla’s name.

As Lana dives deeper into the case, she learns that Jack had more enemies than she realized. When Darla turns up dead, Lana has to turn up the heat on her investigation. With Lana on the case, it won’t be long before someone spills the beans to crack this case wide open. But will she able to find the killer before they strike again?

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Guest Post

In the future, those of us who lived through the dark times of the pandemic will measure those years in what we watched while we tried to mentally disconnect from the virus and the world.

Binging streaming TV series was a balm for our stressed souls.

We started with Tiger King, a docu-series about troublingly strange people who were obsessed with big cats. Some of us sampled the sexy-yet-mind-numbingly dumb 365 Days, if only because the main characters were beautiful and were having the sex we weren’t.

After that, we did a one-eighty and tried to redeem what brain cells we had left with Ted Lasso, or perhaps the Queen’s Gambit.

By 2021, we were ready for a touch of the real world. But not too much, because things were still dicey.

And that’s when we were given the best viewing gift of all: a cozy mystery series. There is nothing like a little gentle murder, one that’s low-stakes yet interesting, to capture our attention.

Only Murders in the Building, starring Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez — along with a rotating list of A-list stars — was released in August of 2021, just as Hot Girl Summer was withering into another dreary, lonely fall.

Readers of cozy mystery novels recognized the series for what it was right away. It had all the hallmarks of the genre: amateur sleuths, a tight knit, closed community, a non-gory homicide, no on-screen sex. The premise was simple: three incredibly different people who all love true crime podcasts come together to make a podcast of their own when a murder happens in their New York City building.

Viewers fell in love with the series, and so did critics; it won multiple Emmys and Golden Globes.

I have a theory that since the pandemic, people have discovered, or re-discovered, cozy mysteries. The genre is perfect for armchair travel.  And in a world that’s become scary and complex, the concept of seeking justice for one homicide turns sharp reality into a comfy, manageable — and most importantly, bingeable — escape.

I published my first cozy mystery, Grounds for Murder, in December of 2020, about nine months before OMITB came out. That show is on its third season, my publisher is about the release the fourth book in the Coffee Lover’s Mystery Series in January. The title is A BEAN TO DIE FOR, and it has all of the cozy tropes readers love: a quirky setting, found family, eccentric characters, humor — and gentle murder.

Here’s an excerpt from my book:

Dad continued talking about Jack’s crop, and I walked on. Sure enough, there were some tall vines snaking up wire trellises. The spicy, earthy scent of tomato plants hung in the humid, heavy air. Maybe I’d get some free tomatoes out of this situation. Was that unethical, to take the previous guy’s fruit?

It was March, which meant the Florida growing season was in full swing. Unlike up north, it’s impossible to cultivate anything in Florida in the summer. I still didn’t fully know what this meant for my small coffee plants sprouting in the makeshift greenhouse back at my place. Would they grow as well as these tomatoes? I sure hoped so.

I was about to round the corner and walk along the last, long row of my plot when I stopped. There was something unusual lying on the ground.

Feet.

“Uh, guys.” Black sandals and white socks came into view, with the toes pointing to the sky. I leaned forward, unsure if I should pro- ceed further. “Hello? Are you okay?”

Erica slammed into my back, probably because she was looking at her phone. “Hello! What? I’m fine!”

“Not you. Him. There’s something other than tomatoes here,” I said in a shaky voice, pointing in front of me.

There, sticking out between two tall plants bursting with fruit, were the sun-beaten, motionless legs of an elderly man.

About the Author

Tara Lush is a Florida-based author and journalist. She’s an RWA Rita finalist, an Amtrak writing fellow, and the winner of the George C. Polk Award for environmental journalism.

She was a reporter with The Associated Press in Florida, covering crime, alligators, natural disasters, and politics. She also writes contemporary romance set in tropical locations under the name Tamara Lush.

Tara is a fan of vintage pulp fiction book covers, Sinatra-era jazz, 1980s fashion, tropical chill, kombucha, gin, tonic, seashells, iPhones, Art Deco, telenovelas, street art, coconut anything, strong coffee and newspapers. She lives on the Gulf Coast with her husband and two dogs.

Her debut mystery series is published by Crooked Lane Books.

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