Miranda Abbott, once known for the crime-solving, karate-chopping church pastor she played on network television, has hit hard times. Turned down for a role on a cable reality show, Miranda is facing ruin when a mysterious postcard arrives, summoning her to Happy Rock, a small town in the Pacific Northwest. But when she gets there, nothing is what she expected.

In dire straits, she signs up for an amateur production at the Happy Rock Little Theatre, competing against the local real estate agent for the lead role. On opening night, one of the actors is murdered, live, in front of the audience. But out of 100 witnesses, no one actually saw what happened. Now everyone is under a cloud of suspicion, including the sardonic town doctor, the local high-school drama teacher, an oil-stained car mechanic, an elderly gentleman who may or may not have been in the CIA—and Miranda herself. Clearly, the only way to solve this mystery is for Miranda to summon her skills as television’s Pastor Fran and draw on the help of her new sidekick, Susan, a shy bookstore clerk who seems to know everyone’s secrets. Because the show must go on!

At last, I’ve found a Cozy Mystery series (I really dislike the Z in Cozy but the genre seems to be an American invention – albeit one that the Canadians excel at, so the American spelling prevails) that has the kind of dry humour and deadpan irony that make me smile.

The GoodReads reviews of ‘I Only Read Murder‘ seemed to split between those who hated it (DNFs and one-star or two-star reviews) and those who loved it. The most common cause for hating it was that the main character was unpleasant and the people around her weren’t much better. It seemed to fall short of what some readers expect of a Cozy in terms of the warm and fuzzies. I took this as good sign and dived in.

I could see immediately that the haters were right about Miranda Abbott not being likeable. She’s a narcissist who is prone to magical thinking and who tramples over everyone she meets in pursuit of her starring role in her own life. The thing is, she’s DESIGNED not to be likeable. She’s chaotic and overwhelming and difficult to be with but it’s her personality that makes the story work. . Yes, she’s selfish, completely self-absorbed but her narcissim means that she often doesn’t notice or understand how the people around her relate to one another. This makes her a perfect filter for the exposition of a mystery. She’s confident and unreasonably demanding so she changes the behaviour of the people around her, forcing them out of their ruts. She’s funny, although often not intentionally, and beneath all the drama and the posturing and the attention-seeking, she is quietly vulnerable.

I was amused by Miranda Abbott’s inability to make sense of the behaviours and expectations of the inhabitants of Happy Rock, a small coastal town in the Pacific Northwest that her husband has spent the past fifteen years running the ‘I Only Read Murder’ bookshop while she has been trying to revive her I-used-to-be-a-TV-star career in the Hollywood Hills. Some of my amusement and Miranda’s bemusement comes from the nature Happy Rock itself. It is as unrealistic as Jessica Fletcher’s town of Cabot Cove, but where Cabot Cove is seen as quaint and charmingly old-fashioned in a way that speaks of American big-city-dwellers nostalgia for a world they’ve never known but would like to think exists, Happy Rock crosses the line from quaint to crazy fairly early on in a way that I think shows you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me response of the Canadian authors to American small-town mythology. The residents of Happy Rock make the residents of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegone seem streetwise and savvy.

One of the things that will either sell this book to a reader or leave them cold is the humour around 1980s American crime shows. Miranda spent six years starring as Pastor Fran, an itinerant minister who travelled America fighting crime with high kicks and karate chops, often working undercover and wearing as little as possible. Some of the humour is about the reverence the fans have for this now-only-available-on-VHS show and some of it comes from Miranda’s tales about what really happened on set. To a degree, these two views of the show mirror the slightly delusional way the inhabitants of Happy Rock see their town and how Miranda sees her career.

Some people may find the first half of the book a little slow. This isn’t a book where the first murder happens ten pages in and you spend the next fifty pages waiting for the second body to drop. ‘I Only Read Murder’ follows the rules set down by the Pastor Fran writers: spend the first half getting the audience to guess who is going to die and the second half trying to figure out how Pastor Fran will uncover the murderer. The murder comes exactly halfway through, although by then I was getting itchy for a killing even though I hadn’t figured out who was going to die.

I was surprised to find that the plot was quite clever. All the clues had been laid out. I had all the information. I had a suspect pool rich with strange people with combative histories, dark secrets and bizarre attitudes. Despite all that, I was completely blindsided by the identity of the murderer. It was such a bold idea that I wanted to applaud when I was told who the killer was.

I know this may not be a book for everyone but its dry, low-key humour, the cleverness of the plot, and the refusal to keep the grimy nature of the real world completely at bay, worked for me. I also liked that this was a cozy mystery where everyone but Miranda, who has to have the subgenre explained to her, is fully aware of how cozy mysteries work but where their grasp on the real world is often less firm.

I’ll be back for the second book, ‘Mystery In The Title‘ later this year.