By: Marita Murray
There is a test that distinguishes the cozy mysteries that become beloved series from the ones that deliver pleasant entertainment and are then forgotten, and it is the test of place. Does the fictional town feel like somewhere you actually know after spending time there, somewhere with its own specific personality and its own specific rhythms and its own specific sense of what matters and what does not? The Bonne Année Mysteries pass that test with considerable room to spare, and Books, Bunnies, and a Body is the installment that most fully demonstrates the depth of imaginative investment N.E. Carlisle has made in Hazelton, Oregon.
The coastal setting is rendered with genuine regional specificity, neither generically charming nor scenically exaggerated but precisely itself, a particular kind of Oregon coastal town that has its own relationship to the sea and to the seasons and to the literary traditions that Année’s events celebrate and extend. The spring atmosphere that opens the book is sensory and specific, the promise of the season made concrete in chocolate bunnies and brunch planning and Oscar’s dedicated seasonal occupation of bunny patrol. The disruption that the egg hunt delivers is felt against that specific promise in a way that gives the mystery its particular emotional texture.
The thematic material that Carlisle weaves through the book, organized around the books that outlive the people who loved them and the question of where they should go next, is handled with the restraint and the delicacy that characterize her writing at its most effective. She allows the theme to be present without foregrounding it at the expense of the genre pleasures the book is simultaneously delivering, which is a considerably more difficult tonal achievement than it sounds. The books that Année encounters in her buying work accumulate into a meditation on memory and inheritance and the specific kind of love that people form with the objects that have mattered to them, rendered through the concrete details of specific editions and specific histories rather than through abstraction.
The mystery mechanics are sound, the community dynamics are warm and specific, Oscar is magnificent, and the recipes are genuinely something you will want to make. The note that the Basque cheesecake serves eight or two after a bad day is the most perfect single line in the book and possibly in the series, and it is completely characteristic of the wit and the warmth that Carlisle brings to everything she writes.
If you have been looking for a cozy mystery series with a genuinely realized sense of place, a protagonist worth spending time with across multiple books, and a community that feels like somewhere you actually know, the Bonne Année Mysteries beginning with Hazelnuts and Homicide and continuing with Books, Bunnies, and a Body by N.E. Carlisle is exactly what you have been looking for. Grab your copy on Amazon today and spend spring in Hazelton.
