Book Review: Crime and Poetry

Crime and Poetry (Magical Bookshop Mystery #1) 
By Amanda Flower
***

I love a cozy, but there are definitely aspects common to the genre that I have difficulty dealing with. I know the whole deal with cozies is that you have an amateur sleuth, but a lot of times that leads to a bumbling snoop who has no reason to stick her nose into a murder investigation, neglects to tell the authorities important pieces of information, and sneaks solo into the dark basement where she inevitably meets the killer.

SO. Where does Crime and Poetry stand in lieu of these pitfalls? Our heroine has a good reason to start an investigation - she found the body and her grandmother was left as as suspect. She also had a good reason for not trusting the police, which involves a rather dark episode from her youth. There IS a sketchy cop. However, there's also a hot, trustworthy Captain, whom she really should have relied on more. Not just because he was so swoony, though that, too. And she is totally guilty of going alone into dark places where she really should have gone with backup (bonus points for the character realizing it, minus points for the thought being 10 minutes too late). On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being Too Stupid Too Live (TSTL) and 10 being Legit Sleuth, I'd stick our heroine somewhere around a 6 or 7.

Other cozy elements that worked REALLY well: Cute lil' town near Niagara Falls with magic water that feeds a magic tree that lives in a bookstore and makes the books magic and crime solvey. All the bonus points for Magic Books. There's also a talking crow and a too-smart-for-a-normal-cat Tuxedo named Emerson. All the bonus points for Precocious Pets.

Now that our heroine is established in the community and helped solve a crime, and the introductory kinks have been worked out, I'm hopeful that the next books will work a little better.

Also, I enjoyed the narrator. She read well with no weird character voices.