I have a soft spot for cozy mysteries. Sometimes I don’t want a gruesome murder with sick and twisted villains, just a light mystery with a side of cooking or homemaking. And I’ve been itching to dig into gardening lately, so when I saw Arsenic in the Azaleas by Ms. Dale Mayer available as an audiobook in the library, I decided to check it out.
Doreen has just got out of an abusive marriage with next to nothing to her name. Her grandma, who is getting on in years, moved into a retirement home and gave Doreen her house. When Doreen arrives at the house, she discovers it comes with an overgrown garden, a large Maine Coon cat, a talkative parrot, and a body under the deck.
As police investigate the discovery of the body, Doreen does her own investigation. And the more she digs, the more she worries that her grandma Nan might be involved.
This was a fun, cute idea of a story. However, there were tons of plot holes, police procedural holes, general research holes, and character interaction holes that just kept interrupting my suspension of disbelief. If this book was a block of cheese, it would be Swiss.
While listening to the audiobook, it felt like the author did the bare minimum of research in order to write a cozy mystery. Arsenic kills. Gotcha. Police have to take a while to dig up bodies. Okay. There’s a difference between term life and whole life insurance. Gotcha. It sounded like the author knew more about horticulture and gardening (looking at her author page on Amazon, it appears she has a line of gardening books as well), but unfortunately this unique little pizazz that I always look for in cozy mysteries wasn’t given any chance to shine. Doreen used to tell her gardeners where to plant things. Thus, she knows plants.
The lack of research really shines through. From police failing to secure the crime scene so that Doreen’s dog Mugs can make discovery after discovery, to the police failing to look up who built the extension on the deck, to Doreen handling every piece of evidence before and after telling police about it (therefore getting her prints and DNA on every single little thing and also breaking chain of custody laws), this book was a mess of fact-breaking again and again.
And the animals’ supernatural-level ability to solve crimes and lead Doreen towards clue after clue just was not realistic. The Cat Who… books have two Siamese cats—one whose owner swears might be psychic and smart enough to solve crimes and the other who is a normal Siamese—creating a lovely cozy mystery gimmick that is a pleasure to read. This, though, was gimmicky to the level of corniness.
Arsenic in the Azaleas is the first book in the Lovely Lethal Garden series. It was published in January of 2019, and the fifteenth will be released this January. That’s fifteen books in three years, not counting the numberless spicy romance books Dale Mayer is churning through in the form of vampire novels, Hot Navy Seals, and so on.
It is rare to see an author churn out so many novels and have them be more than a low-quality quick escape. And there are definitely places for quick escapes, and for authors to churn out books so people can read more of the same. But mysteries have to be tight. They can’t be Swiss cheese. And they’ve gotta have more going for you than a pretty face and some animal sidekicks.
Maybe I’ll read or listen to the next book. I want to see if the author adds more to the gardening aspect of the cozy mysteries. Even if a cozy mystery is flawed, if the part that makes it different is good, be it cooking or painting or gardening, I’ll still devour it.
Ellie Reads ~ a lot 