6 Culinary Cozy Mystery Series to Curl Up With

I’m so excited to be sharing some recommendations of culinary cozy mysteries—or culinary cozies, for short. Cozy mysteries are known for their depiction of quaint and quirky small town communities, strong (often female) amateur sleuths, and satisfyingly happy endings. Food also often features prominently in many of these cozy reads, with some culinarily-focused cozy mysteries even including recipes after the story’s conclusion. Culinary cozies tend to share all these traits, but with one added caveat: the sleuth is also a skilled, and sometimes professional, chef or baker. Susan Rowland has described these culinary characters as “cooking sleuths” in her essay in the book New Perspectives on Detective Fiction. She makes the case for them being “a variety of cozy detective whose professional culinary arts may place her at the scene of a crime, but taking action to solve it is devoid of financial reward.” I love the history of cozies, specifically the fact that the genre has long been dominated by women writers and featured amateur sleuths who are also women. Unlike their masculine counterparts in other crime fiction subgenres, especially noir and hardboiled detective fiction, these w...