Aunt Bessie Invites (Isle of Man Cozy Mystery, #9)

by Diana Xarissa

[Mystereity Reviews]

Aunt Bessie, who grew up in Ohio before moving home to England as a teenager, is having a good old-fashioned Thanksgiving dinner for 40 of her closest friends. She visits a local farm to make arrangements for the turkey when one of the farmers finds the skeleton of a man hidden in one of the barns. Aunt Bessie is thrown into a 60 year old mystery and works to unravel what happened and to bring a killer to justice.

I love this charming cozy mystery series. Aunt Bessie is a Miss Marple-ish old woman who finds one dead body after another and can't resist solving crimes with the decades of information she has cultivated during her life on the beautiful Isle of Man.

I thought the plot in this book was pretty basic; it wasn't difficult at all to figure it out and a majority of the book was filler. I'm trying to understand the point of the new police inspector that no one likes.

Also, I'm seeing more and more cozy mysteries taking great pains to point out how many bodies the MC has found, and this one is no exception. The issue I have is that the very heart of cozy mysteries is having an MC that keeps finding bodies. It's something one has to accept if one reads a lot of cozy mysteries. So stop pointing it out, it just pulls me right out of the story.

Overall, a good read a great series but needs to pare back the filler and beef up the plot if I'm going to continue on much longer.