Thank you to Netgally, the publishers, and Maddie Day

When I requested this book I was unaware that it was apart of a series, one that requires you to read the previous books for this one to make sense. I am unable to read all the previous books along with this one before the publish date. Therefore, I will rate this a fair 3/5 stars and will adjust the rating and review when I am able to read all the books in the series along with this one.

This was a fun cozy mystery. I liked the plot and the characters were a lot of fun. Very much recommend this book.

I love when mysteries take place in book stores. Bookstores hold all the mysteries within them, and then when one takes place there? Instant-buy for me. I love cozies, and this is a great addition to the genre.

I received an advance copy. All thoughts are my own.

Murder at a Cape Bookstore by Maddie Day is the fifth A Cozy Capers Book Group Mystery. It can be read as a standalone for those new to the series. Reading the previous books in the series will provide you with additional background on the main characters and allow you to see how the book group became involved in solving mysteries. Murder at a Cape Bookstore was an okay book for me. It is not a long book, but it felt it (so many chapters). The story is written from Mac’s point of view, so we are subject to her every thought. Mac can be judgmental. It seems that the author wishes to use her stories as a platform for social issues. This is not something that I wish to find in cozy mysteries (reading is supposed to be an escape). There is an interesting cast of characters with my favorite being Mac’s cute niece, Cokey. The mystery was predictable. The guilty party can be identified before the victim is found. The clues are obvious (the author did everything but hire a skywriter announcing the name of the killer). The details of the crime are repeated often (I did not need the same detail repeated ten times). Mac seems to be one of those sleuths who does not mind lying if it will get her the information she wants and does things that are likely to get her killed. I thought it was ironic that Mac said she does not like to pry into her employee’s private lives, but she will ask a family member to do it. I finished Murder at a Cape Bookstore, but it was not a story that I enjoyed. I suggest checking out the earlier books in A Cozy Capers Book Group Mysteries. Murder at a Cape Bookstore is a perfunctory tale with a bicycle procession, a dead director, a slew of suspects, worker woes, chilly conditions, a close call, and a family feast.

When the new Chamber of Commerce director appears to be murdered after his first event, Mac Almeida is on the case. Owner of a local bike store, Mac also doubles as our favorite kind of cozy mystery heroine: amateur sleuth. With her trusty gang, the Cozy Capers at her side, Mac works to solve the mystery through casual conversations with locals and trips to picturesque nearby towns where dark secrets are uncovered that may lead to a big reveal. If you’re already a fan of Maddie Day mysteries or are looking for a new series, this fifth book in a series may be one for you to add to your TBR.

I had mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, I can tell this is crafted by an experienced author. The beats of the story are carefully controlled. There’s a good combination of familiar tropes and new twists, and the reveal at the end makes sense. The main character is charming, and the story is dripping with all sorts of elements I love to see in a cozy mystery: small towns, gossip as a source of clues, and close relationships between family and friends.

That being said, I struggled with getting through this book. There were some weird moments where the author seemed to be trying to share fun facts, but they felt rather shoe-horned in—like when two long-time locals randomly discuss what an osprey is or narrate googling what a “Right to Farm Community” is only for the information to remain irrelevant to the plot. And there were some other awkward moments where the main character’s internal monologue about whether people should be asking about her eggs or knowing they wanted her to have a baby ASAP felt uncomfortably forced.

All in all, I’m glad that I picked up a new cozy mystery and I enjoyed it for what it was, but I don’t think I’ll be picking up the rest of the series.

Thank you Kensington Books and Netgalley for the free advanced reader copy! Opinions expressed in this review are my own.

Spring has come to the Cape Cod town of Westham, Massachusetts, and with it a pushy new Chamber of Commerce director named Wagner Lavoie. While Mac Almeida is happy to participate in the Spring festival he’s organized, she’s not the only local business owner to feel that he’s pressuring them to contribute just a little too much. It’s fine to ask the different stores to consider handing out freebies. Wagner’s demands, however, are not only over the top but verge on the outright reckless.

Regardless of his lack of popularity, it’s still a shock when he’s found dead under a heavy bookcase in the store run by one of Mac’s friends, former police chief Norland Gifford. Norland is stricken that he didn’t do a thorough enough job of securing all the furniture, but Mac suspects that this was no accident. When the local police confirm that Wagner was killed before the bookcase was brought down on him, Mac and Norland are both a little relieved… until another member of their Cozy Capers book club falls under suspicion of Wagner’s murder.

But candy maker Gin Malloy was not the only resident of Westham to have loudly and publicly argued with Wagner. As Mac seeks to clear her best friend’s name, she discovers that Wagner had plenty of enemies, both in town and in the surrounding areas. More disturbingly, he’d had an altercation with Mac’s newest employee, Sandy McKean, whose reaction to his death could be described as shady at best. Will Mac be able to solve the crime and stay out of trouble when danger is potentially lurking so close to home?

This was another fun installment of the Cozy Capers Book Group Mystery series, as Mac and her friends fight crime in their otherwise quiet small town. It’s nice to see the surrounding areas explored as their investigations cast a wider net for suspects. I also love how socially conscious the series strives to be, with this book in particular doing a really good job of including issues of race and disability in a matter of fact manner.

There were five recipes included at the end, all for dishes deliciously described in the text, and I decided to serve this one to my extended family:

QUOTE
Curried Shrimp and Vegetables

2 tablespoons cooking oil
1 onion, minced
1 clove garlic, minced
1 green pepper, seeded and diced
1 teaspoon finely grated fresh ginger
1 ½ teaspoons curry powder
2 tablespoons tomato paste
1 can coconut milk
1 carrot, peeled and sliced
1 cup snap or snow peas, de-stringed
1 pound frozen raw shrimp, thawed and peeled
Juice of one lime
Fresh mint leaves

Heat the oil in a skillet or wok. Saute the onion until translucent. Add the green pepper, ginger, garlic, and curry powder and cook, stirring, for one minute. Stir in tomato paste and cook another two minutes until slightly darkened.

Add coconut milk, carrots, and a pinch of salt. Bring to a simmer and cook several minutes until carrots are cooked. Add peas and shrimp and cook, stirring, until shrimp are barely opaque.

Squeeze lime juice over the sauce. Serve hot over rice, garnishing with fresh mint.
END QUOTE

This was a very mild but tasty curry, and doubles quite easily if you’re feeding larger numbers, as I was. I highly recommend adjusting your salt levels to taste, and perhaps adding your preferred chili oil, too, if you like some heat. The vegetables make this a super healthy dish, though I do recommend letting the shrimp cook for a little longer than just barely opaque, especially if you’ve gotten larger shrimp like I did. I did forget to get any mint but I don’t think that omission had too negative an impact on the final dish.

Next week, we make seasonal candy from a trio of holiday cozy novellas before taking a break for the end of the year. Do join me!

Murder at a Cape Bookstore is the 5th installment of the Cozy Capers Book Group series. MacKenzie "Mac" Almeida and her Cozy mystery book club stumble upon another mystery, this time revolving around the local bookstore, The new Chamber of Commerce Director is found dead underneath a toppled bookcase, and as he has made several enemies in town, foul play is suspected immediately. Of course, this Cozy Book Club cannot let the murder go unsolved, especially since it involves a place that is so beloved to the group. Mac pokes her nose into the case and finds herself in danger...adding all the more to the intrigue and suspense.

This was the first book in the series that I have read, and found that I had no difficulty acclimating to the story. I absolutely love the setting of a small town on Cape Cod, and really found the cast of characters to be entertaining. The mystery had me guessing at first, and overall, I found this to be a delightful and easy-to-read cozy.

Thanks to NetGalley and Kensington Cozies for an Advance Reader Copy (ARC) in exchange for a fair and honest review.

Loved the newest installment in this series. The author consistently grows her characters and provides and fun - and not easy to solve - mystery for us!

Thank You NetGalley for giving me a chance to read this Author. I have not read any of her other books. Now I will really look into reading more of her books. It was a very cozy interesting read that kept me going and wanting to read more when it was late at night. I enjoyed the characters. Mac was amazing how she went about finding her way into trouble and was happy she was a quick thinker.

I love these Maddie Day Cape Cod Mysteries. Living in Massachusetts, the towns are familiar. This story had some interesting plot twists. I just wish the main character wasn’t so obsessive compulsive. It can get annoying.

Thank you Netgalley and publisher for my advanced readers copy

This is a series I follow and enjoy. This book is not my favorite, but it is an enjoyable read. Mac as always seems to get herself into danger, but her family is always there to support her. When there's a murder, Mac has to figure out if one of the other Cape Cod business owners might be the killer.

These stories are well written and easy to fall into.

This is the fifth title in the Cozy Capers Book Group series, narrated in first person, past tense, by Mackenzie “Mac” Almeida, the newly-married owner of the local bicycle shop, who apparently keeps getting involved in local murder investigations since moving back to her small town a couple of years prior.

While I’m not a fan of first person narrative, that in itself was not a problem here, nor did the novel feel crowded by series baggage, even though events from the previous murder cases are mentioned a few times. The book didn’t work for me, however, on several levels.

Like with a lot of small town cozies, there are aspects of the worldbuilding that don’t seem to make sense. Here we have a town too small to have a mayor, which an economy heavily dependent on summer tourism, but with a very active Chamber of Commerce and enough affluent residents supporting several “free all you can eat” dinners per week for the less fortunate ones.

Despite having been raised in town by one of the local ministers, Mackenzie doesn’t “know everyone”, which allows for the introduction of new characters–both as victims and suspects.

There is a fair bit of extraneous detail; I really don’t need to know how someone cleans a kitchen or serves a sandwich, or the age difference between secondary characters, when it adds nothing to either the mystery or characterization.

Even worse is when characters indulge in “as you know, Bob” bits of exposition about things like the local fauna, or when Mac, in her role as narrator, explains every Creole word her family uses with, “which is Capo Verdean for…”; there are ways to give the same information through context..

(Never mind that some of the phrasing is just plain weird–using “our common mother” when she’s thinking about a half-sibling?)

My two main problems are: one, that the suspense plot is pretty lackluster, with unexplained threads left hanging and several details of the solution making no sense when you think about them for literally one minute, and some copaganda tossed in for good measure.

And two, the white gaze.

The author tries hard–too hard–for colorblind ‘inclusivity’.

We are told early on that Mac’s grandmother is a Black person originally from Cape Verde, and there’s a scene where racism (from white Southerners, natch–see footnote 1) is implied; there are passages about her white father’s open-mindedness and fairness of spirit, and how he’s off at a ministers’ convention heading a DEI committee; Mac’s husband mentions his own whiteness, and so on.

However, early in the book we have Mac thinking of another character’s “pale Finnish-heritage eyes”, and much later noticing that a Black character’s cheeks “go pink” when blushing.

It is not that white people can’t write Black, Indigenous or other non-white characters; it’s that the ‘diversity’ here is forced. It really feels like the author had a list to check, with ‘defining characteristics’ in lieu of actual characterization–the one dark-skinned Black character in town? she’s not just a former teacher, but an “award winning English teacher”; an Indigenous character who doesn’t drink, because “she has the Wampanoag gene for alcoholism” (footnote 2), and so on.

(Aside: obsessing over someone’s appearance–is it weight gain? is it pregnancy?–is ill-concealed fatphobia, not a red herring, when the pregnancy is never confirmed in the novel, and the person is a secondary character not suspected of involvement in the murder.)

Murder at a Cape Bookstore gets a 5.00 out of 10

* * * *

1 Too many white liberals from Northern so-called blue states love to think that only white people from “the South” are racist, let alone crassly so; here we have a sizable cast of characters with only one dark-skinned Black person in the whole town, and no one wondering why that would be.

2 There’s a lot to parse about this; I’ll just say that the “Indigenous alcoholism gene” is a racist myth.

I have read several of the books in the Book Group series as well as other books in the Country Store series. They are all delightful cozy mysteries and Maddie Day has become one of my favorite authors for this genre. The characters are well developed and the setting in Cape Cod is delightful. Having vacationed at the Cape, I could envision the town and the stores. I would love to be able to step into the pages of the book and visit with the residents of Westham Springs. While I think you could read this as a standalone, I would encourage you to go back and read from the first book in the series. It definitely will be worth your time.

Thank you to NetGalley and Kensington Cozies for my advanced review copy. All opinions and thoughts are my own.

For more reviews, please visit my blog at: https://www.msladybugsbookreviews.com/. Over 1000 reviews posted!

I am enjoying the progression of the characters in the series. The setting and mysteries are always interesting. There is just something about a small town and murder that will suck you in.

This is the 5th book in the Cozy Capers Book Club Mystery Series, featuring Mackenzie “Mac” Almeida.

Mac's Bike Shop is one of the business owners expected to participate in the Spring equinox event. This festival is organized by Wagner Lavoie, the new Chamber of Commerce director, and is very controversial.

The event turns out to be a surprising success. Unfortunately Wagner Lavoie doesn't survive the day.

Mac is finding that many of her friends and neighbors have a past with Wagner and she is determined to unearth all the secrets, and discover the Killer.

This is the second book I have read in this series and I liked it very much

#MurderataCapeBookstore

I really enjoy this series for its idyllic setting, fun and well-developed characters, and escape from reality.

It was a well-paced and enjoyable cozy mystery. I wish there was a little more whodunnit mystery (I felt I knew pretty early on).

Overall another enjoyable read in the series.

Thank you to #NetGalley and #KensingtonBooks for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Cozy mysteries are an escape from real life: we get a charming town with quaint and sometimes quirky characters, and a glimpse of an idyllic life until murder strikes. This series presents all of those but then also throws way too much social commentary in. I’m all for having an opinion of the state of affairs but I get enough of it everywhere else; I don’t need it in my cozies. Other than that, the story was well written, the characters well developed, and the mystery well plotted (although the solution was evident from the very beginning). I just wish it had been more lighthearted and less preachy.

Murder at a Cape Bookstore was a cute & cozy story that made for the perfect summertime poolside read! I’m a romance reader at heart, so this genre felt a bit out of my comfort zone at first, but I enjoyed this one and I definitely plan on picking up another cozy mystery soon.

Thank you to Kensington Books, Maddie Day, and NetGalley for providing an eARC!

Always great to have a visit with these characters! Cosy mystery indeed! It feels like my friends and I are putting the pieces together to solve the crime! Something light to keep me company! Maddie Day knows just what she’s doing

I thank NetGalley and Kensington Books for providing me with the opportunity to read it sooner in exchange for an honest review.

A fun cozy mystery, this novel is the fifth book in the cozy capers mystery series and the third I have read in this series ! I was thrilled to return to Westham, Cape Cod, MA, and visit with Mac Almeida and her thriving bicycle shop business. It's a quick and easy read and the supporting characters are an interesting bunch - mainly drafted from the MCs bookclub. This book is set in early spring which is obviously not the greatest season for Cape Cod storeowners but the Chamber of Commerce director is trying to drum up business - twisting business owner’s arms so they hand out freebies and generally annoying people left and right. When he ends up dead at the bookstore - trapped under a bookshelf no less, there are suspects galore but was anyone not just annoyed but ready to kill ? Obviously … but who ?

I like the series regulars and the mystery was complex enough to be absorbing. This book provided excellent entertainment and escape which is what I love about cozy mysteries.