A tantalizing cover of "Charred" by G. P. Gottlieb, showcasing a fiery banana dessert in a culinary mystery, complete with included recipes. Why are there endless murders in so many cozy mystery towns? Cozy mystery readers might eventually notice that safe and sweet fictional villages have very high murder rates. Those murder rates are even more distracting than the children who never grow older and cozy protagonists who never marry their sweethearts. As an avid reader and

I didn’t realize I was reading an early cozy mystery when I first picked up a Diane Mott Davidson novel in 1990, but it was a pleasure to read about a crime that didn’t involve hardboiled grit, disgusting descriptions of blood and guts, and moments of spine-chilling fear. Instead, it centered on a divorced caterer worrying about the flakiness of her pie crust as she solved a tricky murder in a small, fictional mountain town in Colorado. What are Cozy Mysteries? Cozy mysteries