100 books like The Whole Cat and Caboodle

This cozy series breaks the mold of the female amateur sleuth with Charlie Harris, the male university librarian. The rest of my expectations are intact, although the cat character Diesel behaves more cat-like than many felines in cozy mysteries.

This series is set in the South, in usually sleepy Athena, Georgia–sleepy until a murder stirs things up. I feel right at home in Charlie’s home/boarding house and getting to know his southern-flavored coworkers, friends, and family. 

I love my local library and its bookmobile. This cozy mystery series has both. Even better, it has a clever cat. I enjoy getting a behind-the-scenes look at library operations.

Eddie, the cat, begins as a stowaway on the Michigan bookmobile and quickly becomes a huge attraction for library patrons. Minnie Hamilton and Eddie are in a unique position to discover bodies on their rural bookmobile route. There is a long romance arc in the series that slowly builds to a sweet conclusion. In a unique living situation, Minnie lives on a houseboat during the summer and in her aunt’s B&B during the winter.

I like how Eddie is involved with uncovering the mysteries in a perfectly logical way, considering he is a cat.

I fell immediately in love with the human characters and the setting despite the cat being a minor player in the story. Hana Keller is Hungarian on her mother’s side of the family. She works at the family’s charming tea house. Grandma Juliana reads tea leaves and is steeped in Hungarian mythology—correct that—grandma’s “tales” are often true to life.

I was engaged with the unique ethnic viewpoint and delighted to learn more about Hungarian culture and food. I devoured the series and have moved on to Buckley’s Writer’s Apprentice series.   

Serendipity. In 2023, I visited a cat café in Tokyo, Japan. Then, I found this series by Cate Conte, which is based on a cat café in New England, USA. It has all the classic elements of cozy mysteries I love–a mystery to be solved, a body without too much violence and no gore, a light romance, a small-town setting, a close, if slightly problematic, family, and, of course, cats! Lots and lots of cats.

When I pick up a book in this series, I know I’ll be transported away to Daybreak Island. While Maddie James tangles with solving a mystery and finding her way through her tangled personal life, each book will end with a solution. I can escape my own problems for a few hours.

Detective Renée Ballard is a woman I hate to love. She sleeps during the day in a tent on the beach–who needs a solid roof over your head when you’re working graveyard for the L.A.P.D.–and occasionally shags the lifeguard. She is a loner, super smart, super tough, touchy, relentlessly driven, bitchy. What’s not to like?

This book got pretty scary. I like to be scared, and there are three more in the series.

I can’t even tell you how much I love Aunt Ginny in Libby Klein’s Poppy McAllister Mystery series! She is an absolute hoot. While I love the whole series, the first introduction to Aunt Ginny in this book remains my favorite. 

Poppy is newly widowed and a grief-stricken disaster when she receives an invitation to her high school reunion. She heads home to Cape May and her eccentric Great Aunt Ginny’s house. As they do in cozy mysteries, a murder happens, and Poppy and Aunt Ginny are on the case.

Poppy and her aunt’s relationship, paired with Aunt Ginny’s crazy antics, always leaves me wiping tears of mirth out of my eyes. Such a fun read!

We first meet Cassie Maddox in Tana French’s debut book, In the Woods, but in her second showing, she really shows her mettle. Recovering from the betrayal she undergoes in the investigation of a brutal child’s murder in the first book, Cassie is recruited for an undercover assignment to solve another murder – but this time, it’s the death of a young woman who she eerily resembles. Cassie must pretend to be the dead woman and gain the trust and confidence of the group of charismatic oddballs who were the closest friends of the victim. I loved Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and The Likeness is something of an homage to that modern classic – with a heroine who’s brave, scrappy, and determined to see the case through to the bitter end.

I was glued to every page of this book!

It’s a claustrophobic thriller with a startling visual image at its heart: an ultra-modern glass cabin in the middle of a deep, dark wood. At night, the light against the glass means you can’t see out – but anyone outside can see right in. I loved the way Ruth Ware turned the rickety old building cliché on its head, turning light from a source of comfort into a threat. 

Edgar Award-winner Bluebird, Bluebird, is the first in the Jay Porter Series. Black Texas Ranger, Jay Porter, tried to escape East Texas and become a lawyer, but his home and people clawed him back. Jay is on the verge of losing his prestigious job, his reputation in tatters, when he heads to a tiny rural town to investigate the death of a visiting Black lawyer from Chicago and the seemingly separate death of a local white woman. Locke deftly reveals how the persistent stain of racism continues to poison many facets of life, while the law enforcement hierarchies and jurisdictional infighting threaten to undo Jay’s best efforts.

Stephen King introduced the innocent, unfiltered but extremely observant Holly Gibney in the phenomenal Mr. Mercedes.

King himself says, “...she more or less stole the book, and she stole my heart.” I completely agree, so much so she was a massive influence on Tilly Bradshaw, the super-sheltered, super-intelligent nerdy sidekick from my own Washington Poe series. She’s the first of three sidekicks in this list who will go on to get a book of their own.

Holly is out September 2023 and it’s the book I’m most looking forward to this year.