The Saturday Morning Post (No. 173)

 

This week begins my 2026 reads. I found both of these books on Kindle Unlimited, and both are contemporary murder mysteries. One is "cozy" the other is not.

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below

The Retired Assassin's Guide to Country Gardening by Naomi Kuttner  DNF 12%

The series is titled "Assassin's Guide" and the listing calls it a New Zealand Paranormal Cozy Mystery. Naomi Kutter lives in New Zealand, and I thought we might get something New Zealandish. As far as I got into the story, it seems to be a bog standard cozy-ish murder mystery with a very generic feel to it. A cookie cutter murder mystery story with, I guess from the subtitle, ghosts. 

I didn't get to the ghost.

I only got as far as the murder. 

The premise: a retired assassin, Dante, buys a home in a NZ village. Then along comes a rich developer, Ted, who seems to know enough about him to want to hire him for a one night bodyguard job where he plans to wines and dines the developers in hopes of sell them the village. He threatens to start rumors about Dante unless he agrees to do the job. Daunte does. Already, I'm out of the story. If Ted knows enough about him to want to hire him as a bodyguard i.e. that he's a dangerous man, he should also know enough not to blackmail him into doing so. And Dante, even if he is trying to put that life behind him, should be tough enough not to be blackmailed into accepting the offer, but to, instead, threaten Ted with, shall we say, consequences, should rumors crop up. This type of fuzzy thinking to aid in plotting the story, really annoys me, even if we turn a blind eye to "the " Ted knows anything about Dante in the first place.

As for the mystery. After deciding not to continue, I pages ahead to find out if the most obvious murderer did indeed do it. And he did. I don't know enough about cozy mysteries to know if the mystery is important or not. Maybe the mystery being so obvious is not a minus. But I have to wonder; did the author really think her murder mystery was clever? Or does this reflect a lack of reading actual mysteries outside of the cozy genre? I must admit that I find a lot of self-published works are written by people who do not appear to be very widely and well read outside of a very narrow genre. On the other hand, it may be that they know their readers' tastes who aren't ones who don't read outside of a very specific genre, and so, with books written to very specific markets, they produce often simple books for simple readers. Who knows?

Perhaps, after my three months of Kindle Unlimited, I might have a better idea if this is the case.

Certainly in this case, this reads like a very ordinary book for this genre, which is probably a plus for its target audience. But I'm looking for something different.

A minor gripe is that it is formatted with every "enter" separated by a blank line, rather than by indentations. I find this method annoying. I don't like reading chunks of words. I want the story to flow.

So, all in all, off to a DNF start 2026. But then 2025 started with a DNF as well, and it turned out to be a great reading year, so there is still hope. 

The Word is Murder by Anthony Horowitz B-

There're a forest of murder mysteries in the Kindle Unlimited library which I'm going to have to find my way out of. But this one I had already intended to read. I had placed a hold on it in my library's ebook catalog. So this is a premeditate murder mystery book.

If you recall the previous Horowitz book, The Marble Hall Murders, you will no doubt recall that the twist in that story was that there was a second, fictional mystery story set within the "real" mystery. A character in that book was writing a mystery story, and the point of view character in the story, an editor, was reading the first two installments of that story, which we, the readers, read along with the editor.

This story also has a twist. The twist here is that the narrator of the story is Anthony Horowitz himself. He is "Watson" to a modern day Sherlock Holmes by the name of Hawthorne. Hawthorne is a fictional consulting detective hired by the police to investigate a fictional murder. Horowirtz, the author of almost a hundred books, from children's books to adult mysteries, as well as a screenwriter for shows and movies including Foyle's War, blends his real life seamlessly into this fictional murder case. 

Hawthorne is a modern Sherlock Holmes clone, even to the point of using his observational prowess to make accurate deductions. In this story, Hawthorne approaches Horowitz with the idea that Horowitz would accompany him on his investigation of a recent murder, record it, and then write a story based on it, splitting the book royalties 50-50. At first Horowitz resists the idea, but when challenged at a book festival audience member to write something real, instead of fantasies, he decides to take Hawthorne up on his offer.

The story involves the murder of a wealthy lady on the very day she decides to arrange her own funeral. Coincidence or not? Unlike his last mystery, it is not overlong, and kept me guessing as to who done it. I don't think you can, but that, I think, is preferable to sticking in an obvious clue to "play fair." like the last Heyer mystery I read... and well, DNF'ed, not to mention the one above.

As I said when reviewing the Marble Hall Murders, Horowitz is a good writer, and he tells an interesting story filled with damaged characters. This is the first of five books with a sixth coming this year. I don't think I will continue with the series, but I might try his Sherlock Holmes story, also available on KU.