By: Maya Towers
There is a single line in the recipe section that closes Books, Bunnies, and a Body that tells you everything you need to know about what kind of book N.E. Carlisle has written and what kind of writer she is. The Basque cheesecake, she notes, serves eight, or two after a bad day. That line is funny and warm and specific and slightly melancholy all at once, and it captures exactly the emotional register that the Bonne Année Mysteries occupy at their best, the understanding that food and community and the ordinary pleasures of a well-lived life are not separate from the darker realities that occasionally intrude on them but are precisely the things that make those intrusions survivable.
Carlisle brings that understanding to every dimension of Books, Bunnies, and a Body, from the spring atmosphere of Hazelton in its most appealing seasonal mode to the genuinely moving meditation on what happens to books when the people who loved them are gone. Année’s work buying whole lots from shuttered shops and estate sales, rescuing first editions and treasured classics for resale through The Literary Table, gives her an unusually intimate relationship with other people’s lost libraries, and Carlisle handles the emotional weight of that work with the same delicacy she brings to everything else in the series.
The mystery itself arrives through the egg hunt, as the series tagline observes with characteristic dry wit, and it is constructed with the care and the respect for the reader’s intelligence that characterize Carlisle’s best work. The puzzle is genuinely puzzling without being frustrating, the suspects are specific and human enough to be genuinely suspicious, and the resolution delivers the satisfying click of a well-built mystery arriving at its inevitable conclusion. The wedding subplot gives the community an emotional investment in resolution that goes beyond justice into the more personal territory of wanting spring’s promises to be kept rather than shadowed.
Oscar the Bernedoodle continues to be one of the more reliably delightful animal characters in contemporary cozy fiction, his bunny patrol duties and investigative sniffing providing both comedy and occasional genuine narrative assistance with the specific dignity of a dog who considers himself a working professional.
The recipes are gluten and nut free, thoughtfully chosen, and presented with the warmth of someone who genuinely wants you to make them. The Basque cheesecake serves eight, or two after a bad day. After a book this good, you will want to make it either way.
If you want a cozy mystery that understands food and community and the specific pleasures of a well-built puzzle in the same way that the best examples of the genre have always understood them, Books, Bunnies, and a Body by N.E. Carlisle is exactly the book you are looking for. Head over to Amazon and get your copy today and start planning which recipe you will make first.
