Colin Conway, Cozy Up To Death

Colin Conway, Cozy Up To Death
© Colin Conway 2020
Original Ink Press/High Speed Creative LLC


Beau Smith, formerly a member of a motorcycle club/gang, has entered the witness protection program; he has a new name (Brody Steele) and a new job.  He’s going to be the owner of a mystery bookstore in the very small town of Pleasant Valley [1], Maine.  His cover story is that he bought it, sight unseen, from a lawyer who was selling it for its previous owner, over the internet.  Which seems to be a bit of a stretch—and, of course, there’s more going on than this. 


Steele (nee Smith) is a fairly complicated guy (among other things, he knits to relieve stress), but he begins, fairly quickly to become at least modestly comfortable in Pleasant Valley.  And he meets Daphne Winterbourne, with whom he is almost immediately smitten.  A sort of running joke throughout the book is the bookstore’s cat, which has about as many names as there are patrons of the store.  There’s also a mafia kingpin, his somewhat slutty wife, and her teenage daughter.  And a local cop who seems to be around mostly for comic relief.


Probably unsurprisingly, given the title, we’re trying to blend a cozy mystery with a sort-of-hard-boiled protagonist.  And it is, for me, something of a stretch.  The new girlfriend (Daphne) doesn’t seen fully imagined (and is, at the beginning of the book portrayed as something os a space cadet).  For that matter, the town seems to have been assembled from central casting rather than being a plausible creation of a real town.  And the ending, while sufficiently boiled, struck me as unsatisfactory.


This is the first in a series (to date) of 3 books (Cozy Up To Murder and Cozy Up To Blood; all three have been published in 2020).  I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that Beau Smith burns through two more new identities in the second and third books in the series.  But I don’t think I’ll be along for the ride.

[1] I, of course, immediately had The Monkees’ song “Pleasant Valley Sunday” running through my head (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boJlejbuyw0)).