A Bean to Die For (A Coffee Lover’s Mystery) by Tara Lush | Author Guest Post

You’re in a sleepy, quaint town where the local librarian is not just a municipal worker who shelves books but is a secret solver of mysteries.

The town’s baker isn’t just kneading dough and selling muffins, but she’s cooking up clues.

And the neighborhood gardener tends to plant more than just flowers—he specializes in seeds of curiosity and intrigue.

In real life, these scenarios would be ludicrous at best. Possibly dangerous at worst. At the very least, they’d end up in certain tragedy or disaster, fodder for a human-interest story in the newspaper.

But not in cozy mystery fiction. Amateur sleuths with regular jobs are the bread and butter of the genre, and readers can’t get enough of them.

Cozies have this incredible knack for turning the most everyday jobs into thrilling adventures. They take the ordinary—the kind of workplaces we might pass by without a second glance—and infuse them with a dollop of curiosity, a dash of puzzle solving, a frisson of danger.

This is what I’ve tried to do in my Coffee Lover’s Mystery series. My heroine, Lana Lewis, is a former investigative reporter. She’s been laid off, like so many journalists, and she returns home to her small community and takes a job at her family’s coffee shop.

There, she can indulge her love of coffee. In book one, GROUNDS FOR MURDER, she’s trying to get used to her new life when a co-worker is found dead in the alley behind the café. That unknowingly sets Lana on a path of sleuthing.

Despite her investigative background, Lana Lewis isn’t your typical amateur detective. She’s more like you and me—an everyday person who is really curious about crime. She might not have a magnifying glass tucked into her barista apron, but her curiosity is as sharp as any detective’s.

Like Lana, these amateur sleuths in cozy mysteries aren’t trained detectives; they’re regular folks thrust into extraordinary situations. They’re the neighbor you chat with while getting the mail, the person you share a smile with at the local bakery, the friendly face behind the counter at the pharmacy. And that’s precisely what makes these stories so irresistible—they’re relatable.

Cozy mysteries invite us to immerse ourselves in these familiar lives. Local hot spots aren’t just a place to buy something; they’re hotbeds of gossip and curiosity.

Take Lana’s world in A BEAN TO DIE FOR, the latest in the Coffee Lover’s Mystery series. As she makes decisions for her café — whether to buy a device that will “print” photos in latte foam on coffees — she’s also tiptoeing around town secrets, sifting through juicy tidbits of gossip, and picking up on the subtle nuances that hint at something amiss.

And here’s the thing about these seemingly simple settings: they hold secrets. Mundane routines hide a treasure trove of whispers and clues. It’s as if the rhythm of everyday life provides the perfect cover for nefarious deeds to unfold unnoticed.

Consider the community garden, where Lana discovers a body:

That was the name of the community garden. Peas on Earth. Like many community touchstones around Devil’s Beach, it was founded by a group of hippies who settled here back in the 1970s and ’80s, back when it was a remote spit of land in the Gulf of Mexico. Dad and Mom had been among the hippies, and over the years had helped usher in a tourism renaissance on the island. Now the place was less hippie and more hipster, but the old-time families like ours still clung to our counterculture roots in our tropical paradise.

Quirky, yes. But also totally everyday and mundane — we all know of an eccentric place in our hometown that’s become an unusual, even celebrated, place.

Cozy mysteries play on this duality: the contrast between the unassuming nature of the everyday, and the unexpected secrets that lurk beneath the surface. They allow us to peek behind the curtain of normalcy and discover a world where the baker might hold the recipe to solving a perplexing crime and the gardener’s knowledge extends beyond pruning tomato bushes.

But it’s not just about the mystery. As the cliché goes, it’s about the journey and the (eccentric and charming) friends we make along the way. It’s about unraveling puzzles while savoring the aroma of freshly ground coffee beans or nibbling on a delectable pastry. It’s about feeling at home in a world where danger lurks but is met with a sense of comfort—a world where the cozy ambiance of a café or the tranquility of a garden becomes the stage for thrilling tales.

Readers are drawn to this. It’s the familiarity mingled with the thrill of the unknown. We yearn for that escape, that tantalizing blend of everyday life and the thrill of a whodunit unfolding in the most unexpected of places.

And that’s what makes cozy mysteries—a genre where the mundane meets the mysterious—irresistible reads, inviting us to unravel secrets while cozying up in our favorite armchair, perhaps with a cup of coffee in hand.