After a Meeting of the Bearfoot Book Club Suzie flies to meet with her agent. When she arrives home she goes for a walk in the woods and finds a dead body. This sets off a chain of events starting with her meeting Detective Pagarelli and amateur sleuthing into the murder and her inheritance from her ex. Cute storyline , really liked Suzie and Jess. A book worth reading. ( )

A Book Club’s Guide to Murder and Mayhem by Bethany Barker is a first-in-series cozy mystery. Suzie Tufts, the main character, has just inherited an estate from her ex-boyfriend who she hasn’t seen in years. A number of unsavory characters then show up, and Suzie turns to her best friend Jess and Jess’ husband to help her figure out what is going on.
In general, this started pretty strong; I liked the ideas and the main characters. The rural setting was great and the place Suzy inherited sounds amazing. The bad guys are suitably mean and scary. The biggest issue may be that the dialog is not great. It is often very awkward when it is not intended to be. When she is talking to 911 about finding a body, there is back and forth repartee that is supposed to be funny but is not. It continues through several pages as she talks to the police that show up. There are also a lot of “laying her hand on her cheek” or “tapping her chin with her finger” and other things that people don’t really do most of the time.
Another issue is that there needs to be some added editing. There are several instances where a particular character will find something out, and then a couple of chapters later, Suzi will state that fact and wonder how they will react to just now finding that thing out. Both annoying and hard to keep track of who knows what.
I did like the relationship with Suzie and her best friend and husband. Suzie is a strong personality, although sometimes stubborn to the point of idiocy, and I found her profession as a text book writer interesting.
This is a quick and easy read with some good parts, but I won’t likely seek out any others in the series.
Thank you to the author and LibraryThing for providing the digital ARC. ( )

I found this book to be a very enjoyable read. It appears to be the first in what the author apparently plans as a series of “Suzie Tuft Cozy Mysteries”, and I think the word cozy is a good one-word description of the novel.

The narrator, Suzie, is introduced to us at a book club meeting in the small community of Bearfoot, Pennsylvania. We learn that she is a writer of text books, and is leaving for a short trip the following day. Upon her return, she goes for a walk on a lonely road that passes her home which is quite isolated. Maybe a mile down the road a suspicious smell leads her to a dead body. A handsome detective arrives (not wearing a wedding ring), and readers will have a hint of what will gradually transpire. It seems that Suzie broke up with a boyfriend 3 years ago, and has not wanted a relationship with another man since. Her ex, a handsome and nice man in the beginning, got hooked on drugs, lost his job, borrowed money from Suzie never repaid, and sealed the breakup by cheating on Suzie. But this detective… well, we shall see.

It turns out that the body Suzie found was a murder victim, and that he was a lawyer coming to see Suzie. But why? Another lawyer from the firm shows up, and to Suzie’s complete surprise, tells her that her ex has died and in his Will has left her some valuable property, including what the will says is any money found on the property. Many questions arise: why her; why not his present live-in girlfriend; why not his brother; and anyway, how could he have owned valuable property in the first place, since he was deeply in debt when they broke up? But when she and her friends Jess and Jake drive up to see what Suzie has inherited, they are astounded. Not only that, they actually find some money hidden on the site.

Pretty soon, her ex’s present girlfriend shows up claiming the property is hers, then the brother shows up claiming it is his, then another mistress shows up, not understanding why she wasn’t the benefactor since she and Mike (the ex) used it for their trysts. Then a Paul Bunyan sized man shows up claiming Mike was keeping some of his belongings in storage for him, but refuses to describe what those items are. Any one of these persons could be the killer, because they know that Suzie would never have known about Mike’s death, let alone his Will, if they could have kept the law firm from reaching her.

Of course, this being a mystery novel, Suzie and her book club friends can’t help but get involved in the murder investigation. Suzie is constantly being harassed and threatened, and that handsome detective is constantly telling her to back off, and often showing up to rescue her. Twists and turns abound, but I don’t want to be a spoiler, so you must read the book to see how it all turns out. ( )

Suzie Tuft is on a peaceful walk with her dog along a country road near her home when she discovers a dead body. That would be upsetting enough, but then an attorney shows up at her home to inform her that the dead man was on his way to inform her about an inheritance. It seems her deadbeat drug abusing ex-boyfriend has died and left her a cottage. When Suzie drafts some friends to go to the cottage with her, she's stunned to find it's a high-end house filled with antiques. The dead man's will indicates she will also inherit all money found on the property, so she and everyone else is wondering how he managed to amass so many assets in the few years they've been broken up. And why would he leave the property to her? There are no shortage of slimy characters who crawl out of the woodwork trying to get Suzie to turn the property over to them as more appropriate heirs. She soon begins to wonder if the dead man was killed in an attempt to keep her from learning about her inheritance. Luckily there's a handsome detective who keeps coming around to help her get to the bottom of the mystery.

I'm not at all sure where the "book club" came into play in the story. It started out with 5 women gathering to discuss a book, but exactly one sentence was devoted to that activity. After that, Suzie encountered them all here and there throughout the story, but there was nothing ever mentioned about a book club again. Seems like since it's in the title, it would have formed more of the story. Suzie herself was a bit hard to like as well. She was forever insisting that she could stay alone in her remote house (where all of the suspects paid her repeated visits) with just her pepper spray and dog to defend her. There were some loose ends that I don't feel like were tied up, either, but since this one says #1, perhaps the questions will all be resolved next time!

I received a copy of this book from a LibraryThing Early Reviewers giveaway.