A Scone to Die For

H.Y. Hanna

Gemma gave up her high-powered job in Sydney and moved back to Oxford to open a tea room. But she soon becomes embroiled not just in scones and toast, but in murder.

“A Scone to Die For” is pretty much the quintessential cozy mystery. It has an uber-cute English setting (Oxford University and a small village nearby), features a female amateur detective with a cute occupation who stumbles upon some rather unpleasant and improbable, but tastefully committed offstage, murders, and who pluckily solves the crime and saves the day while thinking about her broody but handsome ex-boyfriend-turned-police detective. Various and sundry housewives, university professors, and little old ladies complete the cast.

So if you like cozy English mysteries, boy are you likely to like this. If you don’t like cozy mysteries, you’ll probably find it cloying, and should just keep on walking over to the gritty noir section.

I also have to give the book props for bringing up ME/CFS (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome), and in a sympathetic way. Someone in the village has it, and part of the plot revolves around the search for a cure, based on the hopes for Rituximab, which so sadly turned out to be less than a miracle cure in real life. But it’s refreshing to see this devastating illness appear in a book, in an a non-mocking fashion.

Amazon buy link.