MRC RECOMMENDS: Critters and Crime: Magical Cozy Mystery Book Club #11 by Elizabeth Pantley
“Surprising twists kept this plot moving along, with heaps of red herrings thrown in.”
– The Mystery Review Crew
Critters and Crime: Magical Cozy Mystery Book Club #11
By Elizabeth Pantley
Genre: Cozy Mystery, Pets
A quaint riverside town holds many secrets … and the only ones who’ve seen it all are the critters.
This book club dives (literally!) into the pages of a cozy mystery. The quirky group must solve the mystery to get out of the book. It’s so much fun – you’ll wish you had a book club like this!
In this journey, they choose a book set in a lovely riverside town. They land in a charming neighborhood and find they are part of a local book club. They are having a great time – and then a dead body shows up. (Of course it does!)
The clues to what happened come to them in a unique way – via the critters in the house.
As usual, the club finds plenty of time to enjoy the unique setting of their journey, as they solve the mystery – one critter at a time.
*Affiliate links are used in this article. The Mystery Review Crew is an Amazon Affiliate and, as such, earns from qualifying purchases. See our privacy policy and disclosures for more information.
Find it on Goodreads, Amazon, and BookBub.
Review of Critters and Crime: Magical Cozy Mystery Book Club #11 by Elizabeth Pantley
“But just like in any Hallmark movie, I knew that even the coziest small towns had plenty of secrets, crime, and bad guys.”
– Paige Erickson, narrator, Critters and Crimes
This was my first read in this long-running series, but the opening pages explain the series setup so each book can be read as a stand-alone. When Colorado-based Paige Erickson inherited a Bed and Breakfast, the Snapdragon Inn’s library was filled with cozy mysteries that house enchanted books. The premise is that when her own book club chooses a book, they enter it to solve a cozy mystery, becoming characters in the book, and return to the Inn once the mystery is solved. While in the book, that can take them days to accomplish, when they return to the real world, only a few hours have passed.
In this outing, the chosen book takes the crew to the quaint town of Rivershade, where they are apparently on their way to the town’s own book club meeting. Paige’s crew consists of an adventurous group of varied, well-drawn characters that include a mother-son duo, a Santa look-alike, and a dishy professor, among others. And did I mention the ghost and the talking cat?
This key group springs into action after the book club’s hostess, Lillian, finds her husband dead in her kitchen. They understand this is the mystery they must solve, even though Lillian assumes Harold died from his known heart failure. There will be added talking animals, gossipy neighbors, a helpful postal carrier, and much more intrigue before the mystery is solved with the help of Paige’s crew and the animals who live with Lillian and Harold.
Surprising twists kept this plot moving along, with heaps of red herrings thrown in. There is gentle humor that springs from the characterizations. The settings are gorgeously described, with plenty of attention to detail, so they can be imagined in the reader’s mind. Pantley does a fine job of making her talking animal creatures so life-like that even readers who don’t normally enjoy magical realism will be swayed.
This was a such a delightful read!
About Elizabeth Pantley
Elizabeth Pantley is a bestselling author of fiction and non-fiction books. She writes two well-loved cozy mystery series: The Magical Cozy Mystery Book Club and the Destiny Falls Mystery and Magic series. She has also written the international bestselling No-Cry Solution parenting book series that is available in over twenty languages.
Elizabeth lives in the majestic Pacific Northwest and spends winters in the sunny desert of Arizona. While neither location is home to any paranormal beings (that she knows of), the vastly different, yet equally lovely locations are the inspiration for the settings in many of her books.
