A Witchy Cozy Mystery

 

Image copied from Goodreads

Welcome to the Charmed Inn secretly owned and run by a family of witches, some with unusual powers of deduction. By Hook or By Book by Misty Simon is the first in a mystery series that involves murder, eccentric writers, and a dash of magic and romance. It was a fun and thoroughly entertaining read!

Roxie Gleason has grown up in and around her family's inn her whole life in the small Central Pennsylvania town off the Susquehanna River. When her grandfather begins to struggle as manager of the inn, Roxy happily steps in to take the reins. The story opens during her first big event that she's hosting as the Charmed Inn's new manager. However, things take a turn for the murderous when Roxy finds one of her guests dead on the local ferry shortly after checking in. Afraid she or her best friend Dean might be implicated in his death, Roxy decides it's up to her to get to the bottom of what happened.

What follows is a mystery full of twists, turns and red herrings. There are also hints of magic. Roxy and her family are not ordinary innkeepers. Roxy's aunt is a tasseomancer, which I learned is someone who can lead seances. Her uncle is able to scry and foretell the future through that and through his dreams. But Roxy's gift is the most unusual as she is a bibliomancer, someone who can figure things out or find answers to questions through the pages of a book. Whenever she has a question about something, Roxy can search for the right book to help her find the answers within lines of its pages. It isn't a gift that she is particularly proud of as witchy abilities go as it can be hard sometimes to decipher what the lines in the books are telling her. This gets even more confusing though when Roxy's gift begins to change and the answers from the books are revealed in a slightly different way that is hard for her to conceal from normal people. 

I truly enjoyed getting to know Roxy and following the clues to what happened along with her. It seems her murdered guest was involved in more than she ever realized. It also seems that some of her guests that have been coming to the writing conference for years and seemed only mildly and harmlessly eccentric aren't all on the up-and-up as much as she'd always assumed. Add to that the fact that working in close proximity to her best friend Dean, who has some mysteries of his own he's been concealing, make it hard to pretend they're nothing more than friends, and poor Roxy is in for a much busier and more dangerous weekend than she bargained for. 

I look forward to reading more in this series and following along on more Roxy adventures as I found this a very good mystery in terms of the plot and its characters. There were just enough clues given throughout to keep me guessing almost to the end. If you enjoy mysteries set in cozy small town inns run by people who might have a dash of magic at their fingertips, then I think you'll enjoy Misty Simon's By Hook or By Book.

Rather than waiting a couple of weeks for my next blog book review, I'm moving up my timeline for May so that my posts don't coincide with Mother's Day and a trip I going on the end of the month. It will also help me to launch my next review right before I, Spy by L.M. Kemp launches May 5, 2026. Below is the cover and blurb both copied from bookshop.org. Enjoy!

Ex-spy Kendal was one of the best, but now she’s wearing the toughest disguise of her career: Mom.

Kendal Carter is out in the cold and she wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s been four years since her daughter Rosie was born and Kendal has kept her miles away from the danger of her former life as a spy. But when their hiding place is discovered, Kendal is forced to turn to old contacts for help. Her longtime friend and ex-handler Rico doesn’t miss his chance to pull his best spy back in. Whisking them to London, Rico offers them a luxury safe house in an area with good schools. How can Kendal resist?

But there’s a catch, of course. Rico wants Kendal to come back to work for his espionage agency Bon Temps. He’s offering an assignment with no apparent downside, investigating one of the dads at Rosie’s new school who works at one of London’s biggest, murkiest tech firms and suspected of being up to no good. It should be easy enough for someone with her experience, and luckily, mother is the perfect cover.

However, it doesn’t take long for Kendal to realize that Rico’s got an agenda of his own. The tech firm may be dealing in darker and more deadly secrets than they all realize, plus the world of coffee mornings and playdates comes with its own web of allegiances and betrayals. Kendal soon finds herself in way too deep . . .

A gripping blend of suspenseful spy thriller with heartfelt women’s fiction, I, Spy is the first in a propulsive debut series about the masks we all wear, whether as a spy or as a parent.