By: Cesarino Montana
There is a specific pleasure that the best cozy mysteries deliver and that no other genre quite replicates, the pleasure of being thoroughly at home in a place you have never actually visited, of knowing the streets and the shop owners and the community rhythms well enough that when something terrible intrudes on the ordinary sweetness of daily life, the disruption feels genuinely personal rather than merely dramatic. N.E. Carlisle has built exactly that kind of place in Hazelton, Oregon, the charming coastal town where bookshop owner Année runs The Literary Table out of her home with Oscar, her rabbit-chasing Bernedoodle, providing both comic relief and investigative assistance. Books, Bunnies, and a Body is the second installment of the award-winning Bonne Année Mysteries, and it delivers everything the first book earned while deepening the world it established in ways that make Hazelton feel even more irreplaceably itself.
Spring has arrived in Hazelton with chocolate bunnies on order, a Peter Rabbit tea and brunch on the event calendar, and Oscar on full-time bunny patrol with the focused intensity of a dog who considers himself professionally qualified for the assignment. The seasonal sweetness is genuine and rendered with the kind of sensory specificity that makes Carlisle’s writing so immediately immersive, the smell of something baking, the particular quality of spring light in a coastal town, the comfortable rhythms of a community preparing for its traditions. And then the egg hunt turns up something that no Easter tradition was designed to accommodate, and Hazelton has a mystery to solve before the wedding bells that spring also promised have a chance to ring.
What Carlisle does with that setup reflects the considerable craft she has developed across the first two books of the series. The mystery is genuinely puzzling in the specific way that the best cozy mysteries always are, constructed with enough misdirection to keep the reader guessing without ever resorting to the kind of arbitrary withholding that makes puzzles frustrating rather than satisfying. The clues are there, assembled in the specific way that Année’s work rescuing first editions and treasured classics from shuttered shops and estate sales keeps putting her in proximity to, and the resolution arrives with the satisfying click of something that was always there to be found.
The recipes that close the book are one of the series’ most beloved features, and they are as carefully chosen and as warmly presented as everything else in Carlisle’s fictional world. The note that the Basque cheesecake serves eight, or two after a bad day, captures the spirit of the entire enterprise in a single line, the warmth and the humor and the genuine understanding of how food functions in community and in comfort that gives the Bonne Année Mysteries their particular and lasting charm.
Books, Bunnies, and a Body is a book for readers who love their mysteries the way they love their communities, with warmth and humor and the genuine conviction that even the darkest intrusions can be solved and that the place you love will be waiting for you on the other side.
If you love cozy mysteries with a bookshop setting, a scene-stealing dog, a charming coastal community, and the satisfying combination of a good puzzle and genuinely delicious recipes, Books, Bunnies, and a Body by N.E. Carlisle is exactly the book your reading life needs right now. Grab your copy on Amazon today and spend the season in Hazelton, Oregon, where spring is beautiful and murder is always, apparently, a tradition.
