Booked for Murder

• Author: PJ Nelson
• Genre: Cozy Mystery
• Publication Date: December 10, 2024
• Publisher: Dreamscape Media
• Series: Old Juniper Bookstore Mysteries #1

Thank you to NetGalley and Dreamscape Media for providing me with an ARC of this audiobook in exchange for an honest review.

CONTENT WARNING: arson, murder, religious intolerance, misogyny

In this atmospheric Southern cozy debut, Madeline Brimley returns to the bookstore she inherited, discovering that small towns hold deadly secrets.

Madeline Brimley left small-town Georgia many years ago to go to college and pursue her dreams on the stage. Her dramatic escapades are many, but success has eluded her, leaving her at loose ends. But then she gets word that not only has her beloved, eccentric Aunt Rose passed, but she’s left Madeline her equally eccentric bookstore housed in an old Victorian mansion in the small college town of Enigma. But when she arrives in her beat-up Fiat to claim The Old Juniper Bookstore—and restart her life—Madeline is faced with unexpected challenges. The gazebo in the backyard is set ablaze, and a late-night caller threatens to burn the whole store down if she doesn’t leave immediately.

But Madeline Brimley, not one to be intimidated, ignores the threats and soldiers on. Until there’s another fire and a murder in the store itself. Now, with a cloud of suspicion falling over her, it’s up to Madeline to untangle the skein of secrets and find the killer before she herself is the next victim.

It’s no secret that I love a good cozy mystery. A series starter that centers around a bookstore in a small, Southern town seemed like the perfect read in between all the complex and involved fantasy I tend to read. This book had quite a few positives, but as a debut novel, it was pretty good. I read this as an audiobook. There were a few things that led to this rating, though, so let’s dive into my thoughts on the book.

It isn’t always easy to return to where you came from, and this is a fact that Madeline Brimley learns early on in the story. She left the small town in Georgia that she grew up in, and followed her dreams of being an actor first in New York and then Atlanta. Now in her mid-30s and not famous, she’s not quite sure what to do with herself until she finds out that her Aunt Rose has passed away and left her a bookshop in a mansion in Enigma, Georgia. 

From the moment she returns to town, she realizes that things aren’t going to be easy. Her aunt’s bookshop is one of the few remaining businesses that she remembers in town, and while she knows some of the characters, others are completely new to her. 

Hallie Bee Bard does the narration for this book, and her thick Georgia drawl felt completely right for these characters. I’m not quite sure what small-town Georgians actually sound like, but her accent felt appropriate for the story. She did fantastic with her narration, with characters like Madeline herself having less of a drawl because she spent many years away from Georgia.

The story was intriguing, but the pacing felt inconsistent. Sometimes it would be very slow-moving, almost to the point of dragging, and then suddenly the pace would pick up. I enjoyed the plot line to the story, along with the number of red herrings to keep readers guessing. There are several side plots, which tracks with the majority of cozy mysteries that I have read. Madeline meets someone who might become a romantic partner somewhere down the line, but the storyline in this book leads me to believe that we’ll learn more about this possible slow-burn romance in future books. 

The side characters ranged from well-rounded to one-dimensional, with characters who were more involved being more complex, while characters who were more peripheral to the story read more like caricatures. I wasn’t a fan of how some of the side characters were portrayed as ignorant, small-town hicks with secrets galore. Although they were living in a small town, it was also the location of a small, liberal college, which can both make secrets more common and more difficult to keep secret. One of the major side characters is a professor at the college, yet still read as though she was a hick. Not everyone in the rural South is uneducated or cooks meth, yet there are multiple characters who fit that description, while the rest of the town is basically trying desperately to escape small-town life. 

Madeline herself is someone who chased her dreams right out of rural Georgia, but ended up back there after seeing more of the world, but that doesn’t stop her from judging the majority of the town for being exactly who she was before she left town. It made me feel less empathetic towards her, especially as she consistently undermined the town cop simply because she knew him before she left and he stayed in town. As expected in a cozy, she makes quick and impulsive decisions that aren’t always safe, and I was so disappointed in her for not thinking things through and ensuring that she was safe from someone who clearly wanted her gone.

Overall, this was a good debut with room for growth in further books that I hope are forthcoming. I enjoyed the plot as it developed, and the things I didn’t love were mostly minor kinks that will most likely resolve in future books, such as the pacing and the discrepancy in character development. I have high hopes for the future of this series, and hope that we get to see more of the small town with less of the judgment. I’ll definitely be checking out the next book in this series, and can recommend this to those who like cozy mysteries, especially those set in bookshops, love listening to a Southern drawl, and can handle a little shade being thrown in the direction of people living in rural Georgia.

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