Thursday Thoughts ~ about whodunits

Bodies, Baddies, and a Crabby Tabby: A Bliss Bay Village Mystery (Book 1) ~ by Sherri Bryan, 2018, cozy mystery, 420 pages (my friend Donna rated it 4/5)

Megan Fallon is in a pickle.  As if empty-nest syndrome wasn't bad enough, she's joined the ranks of the unemployed, and her fiancé’s run off with her hairdresser.  In desperate need of a change of scene, she heads back to her childhood village home for some long-overdue friends and family time.  Things are looking up until members of the community start getting bumped off at an alarming rate, and Megan finds herself at the heart of an investigation that has her suspecting everyone.  As she becomes involved in the hunt for a murderer, it’s not long before she finds out that some of the villagers are harboring shocking secrets.  Will you guess whodunnit?

Quiet The Dead: Promise McNeal Mysteries (Book 1) ~ by Morgan James, 2010, cozy mystery (North Carolina), 350 pages (my friend Donna rated it 4/5)

Promise McNeal is a retired psychologist and transplant from Atlanta to the Western North Carolina Mountains.  She doesn’t believe in coincidences, but does believe the universe always has a plan.  Sometimes that plan may include messages from the dearly, or not so dearly, departed.  Just how her dream of a hanged woman dangling over a creek fits into that plan, she isn’t sure.  When she accepts a consulting job from Atlanta attorney Garland Wang, she has a sense she’s about to find out.  Garland says the assignment is a piece of cake, though Garland is selective in sharing information.  Promise finds herself digging into something that isn’t at all like cake.

But dig she does, since Garland pays well.  She’s also more than curious about who killed the wealthy socialite, Stella Tournay, and why Stella haunts her dreams.  But then, as Promise is within a hand’s grasp of unraveling the truth about Stella’s death and a shocking secret about the Tournay fortune, another murder pushes her into the darkness with only her intuition as armor and clues from a murdered woman as weapons.

The Church Murders: Greek Island Mysteries (Book 2) ~ by Luke Christodoulou, 2015, thriller (Greece), 210 pages

The picturesque Greek Isles are unsettled by death.  Hellenic Police Captain Costa Papacosta and Lieutenant Ioli Cara are faced with four brutal cases all strangely connected to the Greek church.  A reporter investigating the existence of a Gospel written by Jesus himself is found stabbed to death on the island of Salamina, while a lawyer and a young girl have gone missing.

In Santorini, the most beautiful of all Greek islands, bodies are piling up fast.  Murder after murder, our officers are left puzzled.  All the clues are there, but who is the killer?

The Ionian islands.  Seven islands, seven bodies.  Suicides or foul play?  Ioli’s lack of faith is tested by a boy experiencing stigmata on the island of Kefallonia.  Could his marks be for real?  Time is against the two investigators and lives are on the line.

My thoughts:  A whodunit is "the lowest form of literature" (according to page 66 of Time Magazine, February 27-March 6, 2023).  But I'm in the mood for one (or two or three).  I found these whodunits on the Kindle I inherited from my friend Donna, and the cover of the third one says it's a stand-alone thriller.  Since Donna never got the first book or the following four in the series, I certainly hope it's a stand-alone book!