American/Cozy Mysteries

Essays:
§ Cozies: An Especially American Art Form
§ When is a Cozy not a Cozy?
Kenneth Abel
§ Cold Steel Rain 		Alina Adams
§ Murder on Ice 		Donna Andrews
§ The Penguin Who Knew Too Much 		Nevada Barr
§ High Country
Larry Beinhart
§ The Librarian 		Claudia Bishop and Don Bruns (editors)
§ A Merry Band of Murderers 		Meredith Blevins
§ The Hummingbird Wizard 		Lawrence Block
§ The Burglar in the Rye
Jan Brogan
§ A Confidential Source 		Judy Clemens
§ The Day Will Come 		Joan Coggin
§ Who Killed the Curate? 		Jeffrey Cohen
§ As Dog is My Witness
§ Some Like it Hot-Buttered
Thomas Cook
§ Into the Web 		Gordon Cotler
§ Artist’s Proof 		Casey Daniels
§ Don of the Dead
Diane Mott Davidson
§ Dark Tort
§ Double Shot
Aaron Elkins
§ Good Blood 		Sharon Fiffer
§ Buried Stuff 		Kate Flora
§ Stalking Death 		Christine Goff
§ A Rant of Ravens
Denise Hamilton
§ Last Lullaby
§ Savage Garden
§ Sugar Skull 		David Handler
§ The Cold Blue Blood 		Charlaine Harris
§ Grave Sight
§ Grave Surprise
§ Shakespeare’s Counselor 		Rosemary Harris
§ Pushing Up Daisies
Ellen Hart
§ An Intimate Ghost
§ The Iron Girl
§ Night Vision 		Libby Fischer Hellmann
§ An Image of Death
§ A Picture of Guilt
§ A Shot to Die For 		Martha C. Lawrence
§ Ashes of Aries 		Marc Lecard
§ Vinnie's Head
Laura Lippman
§ To the Power of Three 		Mary Logue
§ Maiden Rock 		Margaret Maron
§ Last Lessons of Summer 		Sujata Massey
§ Girl in a Box
Alexander McCall-Smith
§ The #1 Ladies Detective Agency 		Deborah Morgan
§ The Marriage Casket
§ The Weedless Widow 		Marcia Muller
§ Cyanide Wells 		Kem Nunn
§ Tijuana Straits
Nancy Pickard
§ The Virgin of Small Plains 		David Skibbins
§ Eight of Swords 		Jessica Speart
§ Blue Twilight 		Julia Spencer-Fleming
§ All Mortal Flesh
§ A Fountain Filled With Blood
§ I Shall Not Want
§ In the Bleak Midwinter
§ Out of the Deep I Cry
§ To Darkness and to Death
Denise Swanson
§ Murder of a Sleeping Beauty
§ Murder of a Barbie and Ken
§ Murder of a Snake in the Grass 		Sarah Stewart Taylor
§ Judgment of the Grave
§ Mansions of the Dead
§ O’ Artful Death
§ Still as Death 		Elaine Viets
§ Dying to Call You
§ Just Murdered
§ Murder with Reservations
§ Murder Unleashed
§ Shop Till You Drop


Murder of a Sleeping Beauty, Denise Swanson, Signet $5.99.

Every time I read one of Denise Swanson's books a mantra sweeps through my brain - I don't read cozies - and yet, here I am, reading another one. I can't figure it out except that I enjoy Swanson's main character, school psychologist Skye Denison, so much that I just have to read the next one to see what will happen. Denise herself put me on the path to reading this book when I heard her on a panel describing the over achieving parents who push their kids beyond what the kids are interested in doing themselves.

In this novel, Skye finds a dead cheerleader in the gym - dressed for the school play as Sleeping Beauty. All of Swanson's resolutions and hooks have been interior, domestic, and often family related - this novel is no exception. As Denison goes about the job of counseling the kids - with many roadblocks thrown her way from an unhelpful (to say the least) principal - she starts to uncover parts of the dead beauty queen's life that make her suspicious. And Skye being Skye, she has to go ahead and find out what is going on.

Tossed into this mix is the wreck that is Skye's love life - if you had been rooting for the funeral director in past books, you may have to give that one up. This has one of the best explorations yet of Skye's function as a school psychologist, and the way she's able to interact with her students is wonderful. The subtext of the novel - the parents who have pushed their beautiful daughter to an unachievable perfection - is an interesting one as well. This author continues to hit pleasant, well written books out of the park.

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