The Best Cozy Mysteries to Read This Fall

Here’s a wonderful and inventive series that is traditional in the mystery genre tropes but adds a new twist–baby elephant!–while skating the line between cozy and mystery. It offers something for all readers while dealing with real issues without being gruesome or dark. And again, baby elephant! Inspector Ashwin Chopra retires, inherits a baby elephant (how do I sign up for this to happen to me?!), runs a restaurant, but ya know, it’s a mystery series, so he’s dragged into a mystery. He may be retired from the police force, but he’s soon working as a PI with his little baby elephant in tow. Come for the baby elephant and stay for the mystery-solving!

If you didn’t already know that Mary Higgins Clark’s daughter is also a mystery author, now you know and have a book to pick up. Regan Reilly’s former roommate finally turns up. Dead. Being the daughter of a mystery writer and a P.I., Reilly wants nothing more than to solve this murder, and she’ll get her wish because the clues of the case follow her onboard the Queen Guinever cruise. I am always here for mystery solving while trapped on something–especially on the high seas!

For fans of “chick-lit” (a genre that I love with a term I hate), here's a mystery. We have Bailey Weggins, a Manhattan women's magazine crime writer who is naturally the perfect person to solve a crime, so of course, she ends up with a crime to solve! Weggins puts her personal life issues on the back burner when her boss’s live-in nanny is found murdered, and it seems her boss was actually the intended target. Is someone trying to kill her editor? If so. why? And who...

Does the life of an ex-librarian, current romance writer–who of course solves murders–sound like fun? Because that’s what you get! Jacqueline Kirby goes from thinking of quitting writing to quickly being lured into writing the sequel for a wildly popular novel by the author's heirs. What could go wrong? Well. it’s a murder mystery, so as soon as Kirby starts looking over notes and researching, things start getting a bit scary–until she realizes someone clearly doesn’t want her to write this book and they’re willing to end her life if need be.

Maybe a cozy mystery in Scotland is the warm blanket your heart needs–with some murder, of course. Jane Winters is a widowed tabloid reporter who has been murdered, and as you can imagine the whole tabloid writer part made her super unpopular. So plenty of suspects keep Scottish highland village cop Hamish Macbeth busy in trying to find the killer...