Dead and Berried by Peg Cochran

Dead and Berried by Peg Cochran ISBN-13: 9780425274552 Mass Market Paperback: 304 pages Publisher: Berkley Prime Crime Released: May 2, 2017

Source: Review copy from the publisher.

Book Description, Modified from Back Cover:
It's June in Cranberry Cove and Monica Albertson's plan to sell cranberry relish to chain stores is taking off. The cranberry bogs are in bloom, and local beekeeper Rick Taylor and his assistant Lori Wenk are bringing in bees to pollinate the blossoms. When a fatal prick fells Lori, the buzz is that Rick is to blame.

In trying to clear her friend's name, Monica discovers that more than a few people in Cranberry Cove have felt the power of Lori's venom, and it looks as if this time she may have agitated the hive a bit too much. With the fate of the farm on the line, Monica must get to the bottom of the crime before another victim gets stung.


My Review:
Dead and Berried is a cozy mystery. This is the third book in the series. You don't need to read the previous books to understand this one, and this one didn't spoil the whodunit of the previous mysteries.

This was a clue-based mystery, and there were enough clues to guess whodunit. The clues were easy for me to spot, so I knew whodunit very early on and further clues only confirmed it. The heroine isn't stupid, but she's a little slow in connecting subtle clues together. I liked that the police also figured out whodunit. The heroine provided them with any solid evidence she discovered, so she was helpful to them. She's also generally a nice person and so didn't go around ruining people's reputations in the course of her investigations (which I appreciate).

There were no sex scenes or bad language. Overall, I'd recommend this interesting novel.

Side note: I'm getting a little tired of cozies (by other authors) where the police are incompetent so the slow heroine can be the one to solve the case. My favorite cozy mysteries are those where the heroine is very clever and/or provides clues to the police that they can't get on their own. I don't enjoy cozies where the heroines essentially compete with the police. Why not just make the heroine a police detective if she's basically doing the same things the police are (or ought to be) doing? The point of the amateur detective is that they can learn details that people won't tell the police (for one reason or another) or spot things the police don't even know to look for. And, yes, I've been reading some cozies lately that I didn't like and so didn't review but which inspired this rant.


If you've read this book, what do you think about it? I'd be honored if you wrote your own opinion of the book in the comments.


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