Bran New Death (A Merry Muffin Mystery)

I loved everything about this book.The characters: Merry who has inherited a run down castle in New York from her uncle. Merry is a widow and has just been fired from her job.Shilo, a model, is Merry's best friend who comes to help and keep Merry company.McGill is the real estate agent, who is helping fix the grounds.Binny owns the local bakery and is Rusty's daughter.Gogi Grace is the sophisticated woman running the local retirement home and also Sheriff Grace's mother.Beckett is Uncle Mel's cat.The plot: Upon arriving, Merry finds holes all over the yard. She soon finds out that her uncle's death might not be what it seems to be. Uncle Mel and his business partner, Rusty, had a number of lawsuits against one another, and, Rusty has been missing for months. Merry finds out that Tom, Rusy's son is the culprit who has been digging holes in her yard and one morning she finds him dead in one of the holes. She has no idea why he dug the holes, what was going on with Uncle Mel and Rusty's business or who kills Tom. But, she's determined to find out.The setting: Autumn Vale, a small town in New York. The huge gothic castle with arched windows, stained glass, tapestries, a grand staircase antique furniture, a commercial kitchen, a ballroom and lots of potential, is surrounded by forest lands. Merry would really like to stay and make it into some kind of business, possibly a wedding destination, but she's broke and thinks that the only thing that she can do is fix it up in order to sell it. The town is small and there are lots of store windows that have been boarded up. But, there's the bakery, an antiques store, the bank, a general store and a few other businesses still open. There are lots of quirky people in town that Merry encounters.The recipes: I made the "Golden Acres Banana Bran Muffins" and "Gouda Harvest Vegetable Chowder." Both were delicious and I'll definitely make them again.I see so much potential in this book: Merry fixing the castle and creating a business where guests will visit or stay. Autumn Vale having more businesses move in and the town becoming a tourist destination. Merry moving on with her life and spending more time with her old friends and making new friends. And, of course, mysteries.The mystery was great. I didn't know who the murderer was until I was at the end of the book. I didn't find the beginning to be slow, but enjoyed the descriptions of the places, people, and Merry's situation. I'm really looking forward to the second book in this series.

I've enjoyed the books in Victoria Hamilton's Vintage Kitchen Mysteries (A Deadly Grind and Bowled Over) enough to encourage me to give this new series a try. It was certainly worthwhile. This book doesn't have the extensive interest in vintage kitchenware that the other series does, but it has many interesting characters, an old "castle" in upstate New York, some muffin lore, and a rather special cat named Becket.The plot turns on a familiar premise in cozy mysteries: the main character inherits a house or a business or, in this case, a large castle-like home from a recently-deceased relative. In this plot scenario, usually a good deal of time is taken up with the decision of whether the protagonist should keep it, and often this decision involves a relocation. All those circumstances are here, but to her credit, Ms. Hamilton puts a different spin on some of them.Merry Wynter, the protagonist, visits her inherited castle and gradually comes to know the unusual characters in the town of Autumn Vale, NY, but she also has friends from her previous life that come to visit her. There are many characters--some old friends, some new acquaintances--and the links between the crimes and various characters make for an interesting plot. The last portion of the book was especially good, I thought, and events were quite unpredictable. I always like unpredictability, especially in a situation where some features of the plot are standard ones in cozy mysteries. The cat, Becket, is a bit of a mystery too at first, but he gradually becomes more important. Muffins play a secondary role, but they are part of Merry's decision about whether to stay or not.The recipes at the end for muffins and other treats are certainly tempting. It's all very warm and cozy, and a very good start for this new series.

This is one of my new favorite series now! I had seen that the author released a new book this summer after quite a long time and decided that it was time to get caught up in the series. I loved this one so much as well as the awesome characters that I plan to read the next one sometime this month since it's Halloween-themed.Merry was a likable character, intelligent as well as life smart, and she had a sad life lately with the need to escape to her inheritance, an upstate New York castle. Her friend Shiloh was awesome, and I just loved sweet Pish Lincoln, Merry's financial adviser and longtime friend. The locals were so fun and quirky. I can just picture silly Gordy and Zeke kind of bumbling around working here and there at odd jobs. Goofy but trustworthy is my take on them. Hannah at the library was such a sweetheart, and even tough-as-nails Lizzie, the constantly suspended from high school girl that Merry can't help but like. I really liked Gogi, the sheriff's mom who was Merry's first real friend in town. She ran a retirement center and hired Merry to bake muffins for her "oldsters" as she fondly called them.Everyone and their brother in town had secrets, and after a couple of people asked Merry to look into her uncle's death and the recent murder of a man on her property, she found out something a little bigger than what she ever expected to be going on in such a small town. The showdown in the woods with the killer was suspenseful, and I'm sure Merry was happy for the help of her uncle's cat as well as a scraggly stranger that showed up. Merry and Pish got to pull a little covert spying on some people that Pish had been checking up on, with the sheriff's permission. Everything was neatly wrapped up, but there was a cool surprise at the end that'll continue to the next book. It's a whole separate thing, and that's one reason why I'm very anxious to start on book 2.