Stacey Alabaster

Australia, small-business, small-town, bookseller, cozy-mystery, surfer, short, series, shipwreck, friendship, situational-humor, verbal-humor, local-law-enforcement*****

This one is even funnier than the first two! Organized Claire runs a bookshop and scatty Alyson paints surfboards. The two friends live in a seaside town where the rest of the businesses are all dependent on the tourism of surfboarders. Enter both living and dead persons washing ashore from a shipwreck and all the questions and problems involved!… (plus d'informations)

I'm Aussie so with an Aussie setting I really wanted to like this, but I just didn't. And part of that was because the Aussie setting seemed to lack the Aussieness and part of it was I hated the main characters and the motives for murder were ridiculous.

The plot was weak - no one kills because they get a 1 star review (Or obviously I would be a gonner) - but I could've overlooked it as the cosy mystery genre isn't exactly full of strong plots. What I struggled to overlook was not liking any of the characters - afterall they're the redeeming feature of a cosy mystery. But Claire was an absolute brat and a stuck up one at that, and Alyson may not have been a brat but she was a total moron. The rest of the characters were bland and forgettable.

It just fell flat and left me struggling to get through 113 pages. 1 star.… (plus d'informations)

The cosiest of cosies.

These short cosy mysteries are lovely diversions in a hectic or unsettled life.

George, the new owner of Pottsville's main street craft store doesn't really "fit in" with her new community. Her best friends are her dog and one of the town's police officers. (Is there romance here?) The books have the classic antagonistic-hypercritical friend, idiosyncratic characters (including our heroine) and the occasional element of George's past life that emerges to haunt her. Small town Pottsville also has the requisite high murder rate.

These stories are short and fun. If you want to read high-quality literature don't bother with the Craft Circle Mysteries. However, if you want a distraction from the world's woes, that's a simple bed-time read to relax, these stories are a good choice.… (plus d'informations)