Mindy Quigley

Tag: funny cozy mysteries

  • Cozy Companions: Six Furry Sidekicks Who Kick Butt

    Excerpted from Criminal Element, Sept. 19, 2025

    No cozy mystery would be complete without a trusty companion or two. Sometimes these come in the form of a team of quirky relatives, like the Calendar Crew of meddling aunties in Mia P. Manansala’s Tita Rosie’s Kitchen Mysteries or even a supernatural frenemy, as in Olivia Blacke’s Ruby and Cordelia Mysteries.

    In my Deep Dish series, though, the key role of sounding board/emotional supporter/cuddler-in-chief belongs to Butterball, an orange tabby with the heart of a lion and the stomach of a chonk-monster. While Butterball isn’t exactly Sherlock Holmes (he is, after all, just a cat), he has a way of revealing clues that my human sleuth, Delilah O’Leary, might otherwise overlook.

    In my latest book, At Death’s Dough, the roles are reversed—this time it’s Butterball who lands in hot water, and it’s Delilah’s turn to rescue him. Writing the story got me thinking about just how much pets bring to a cozy mystery.

    Furry (and scaly and feathered) companions have become fixtures in cozy mysteries not just because they’re cute, but because they serve important narrative and dramatic functions. They provide a wholesome counterbalance to the violence at the heart of these stories. They can also ground the sleuth in everyday life, showing a softer, more vulnerable side of a character like Delilah, whose personality can be prickly. Their instincts, antics, and sheer existence can move the plot forward in organic ways. At the same time, they reinforce one of the central pillars of the cozy mystery genre: even in the dark shadow of crime, comfort is close at hand.

    Butterball isn’t the only four-legged sidekick kicking butt in the world of cozies. From loyal hounds to opinionated cats, these companions prove that crime-solving can be more fun with a furry gumshoe (gum-paw?) on the case.

    Here are six of my favorite books with animal sidekicks…

    READ MY LIST IN CRIMINAL ELEMENT MAGAZINE

  • I, for sure, never made a chinchilla live in a Barbie camper van.

    Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by CanvasRebel Magazine. Read below for my take on Eighties parenting, Norman Lear, and writing lessons learned (and unlearned)….

    CR: Mindy, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Do you think your parents have had a meaningful impact on you and your journey?

    MQ: My childhood spanned the 80s and 90s, when benign neglect was the dominant parenting style. My mom and dad didn’t micromanage my schoolwork or bog me down with organized extra-curriculars. For a good portion of my childhood, they probably didn’t even know where I was.*

    That parenting style freed me to read and watch TV for countless hours every day, unfettered by parental expectations. The fact that they worked the kinds of jobs people without college degrees tend to work—secretary, restaurant server, auto parts store manager, etc.—was also a blessing. When it came time for me to get a job, I chose work that interested me, with no fear that my parents would judge my choices and no expectation of making giant sums of money.

    *Definitely not climbing into that broken storm drain by Jenny’s house! Nor “borrowing” Christine’s brother’s chinchilla and trying to make it live in a Barbie camper van! Those things for sure didn’t happen.

    Read the rest of the interview on the CanvasRebel website…

  • AND THEY ALL DIED HAPPILY EVER AFTER: COZIES, GRIMDARKS, AND MODERN MORALITY

    Those familiar with Game of Thrones will recognize the hallmarks of “grimdark” storytelling. In a grimdark world, morals are flexible. Dark aesthetics and gritty details dominate. Today’s hero could be tomorrow’s villain, if external circumstances change. Given the headlines of the past few years, the moral uncertainty of such stories has a “ripped from the headlines” feel that seems appropriate for our chaotic era.

    On their face, grimdarks are everything cozy mysteries are not. Grimdarks are gritty and explicit where cozies are saccharine and romanticized. Cozies are fluffy and escapist. Grimdarks are meaty, heavy, real.

    But the more time I spend reading and writing cozies, the more I think of them as tools for confronting, and reckoning with, the same (un)ethical landscapes as grimdarks. Even as I type this, I can hear the distant sizzle of frying synapses as readers try to suss out what a cozy mystery stalwart like bakery owner Hannah Swensen has in common with #teamgrimdark soldier of fortune Jamie Lannister, other than perhaps Nordic good looks and an intense love for their sisters.

    Hear me out.

    READ THE FULL ARTICLE AT CRIMEREADS…

  • SOPHOMORE SLAYS: SEVEN KILLER MYSTERY SERIES WHERE BOOK TWO IS EVEN BETTER

    SOPHOMORE SLAYS: SEVEN KILLER MYSTERY SERIES WHERE BOOK TWO IS EVEN BETTER

    You’ve written a great first novel. There’s buzz! There’s praise! The book is flying off bookstore shelves. Even the notoriously finicky and hot-blooded reviewers on Goodreads adore it. They’re throwing stars at you like henchmen in a ninja movie. Your publisher loves the book so much in fact, that they want you to write another one.

    Pronto.

    Welcome to the Land of the Sophomore Slump.

    Many writers spend years crafting their first book in a headspace that’s blissfully free from deadlines, contracts, and fan expectations. Then, when their debut novel is (miracle of miracles!) successful, they’re expected to crank out the next book in the series in record time–often less than a year if they’re writing a mystery series. The pressure to live up to expectations has gotten the better of many an author. Even Harper Lee, who penned what is routinely ranked among the greatest American novels of all time, struggled to repeat To Kill a Mockingbird’s success.

    My second book, Ashes to Ashes, Crust to Crust, came out earlier this year, but I had a fortunate turn of fate that kept me from facing the usual pressures that portend the Sophomore Slump. The pandemic delayed my contract and thus pushed back the release of my Deep Dish Mystery Series, which meant that I was able to finish books two and three before the first book even came out. Now that I’m working on book four in the series, though, I’m doing my best to guard against Senioritis!

    My own experience leaves me even more impressed when a fellow author manages to pull off a series that improves with each new outing. Forget mere whodunnits, these next-in-the-series reads are truly next-level.

    Pop on over to Crime Reads to check out my list of Seven Sophomore Slays that’ll keep you glued to your Kindle…

    https://crimereads.com/sophomore-slays-seven-killer-mystery-series-where-book-two-is-even-better/

  • Made you LOL!

    Made you LOL!

    My favorite kind of reader feedback is when someone tells me they laughed out loud at something I wrote and scared their dog/spit their soda/made fellow passengers on the subway doubt their sanity.

    LOLs are my love language.

    So I was especially heartened when Holly Adams, the awesomely talented narrator of my Mount Moriah Mysteries and my Deep Dish Mysteries, sent me this outtake of her recording a scene from Ashes to Ashes, Crust to Crust.

    For reference, the dialogue in question involves sous chef Sonya talking to her uncle Avi, an attorney who has come to Geneva Bay to help a friend caught in a sticky situation with the local police. The scene is supposed to read as written below.

    “Why did you let her talk?” Sonya said. “You named your dog Miranda, for God’s sake. The only dog in existence named after a constitutional procedure. You always told me not to answer questions if I ever got arrested.”

    Avi threw up his hands. “So I’m supposed to tackle your lady friend and stuff a gag in her mouth? I told her to shut her yapper. She didn’t listen to me. Just like your Aunt Ruthie, or little Miranda for that matter. She ate a full tube of your aunt’s red lipstick, did your mom tell you? Now I gotta buy new carpet for the rumpus room.”

    Ashes to Ashes, Crust to Crust

    I admit that I, too, sometimes get a giggle out of my characters. The reaction is weirdly detached. I don’t feel like I’m chuckling at my own cleverness or patting myself on the back. I’m laughing at this hilarious group of people who happen to be fictional and live inside my head.

    My husband walked by my office one day and caught me in the act–alone, laughing at my computer screen. “You won’t believe what Butterball did!” I said, pointing to the Word document. When I set out to write that scene, I had a vague idea of where it was going, but I had no inkling that Butterball the cat, out of nowhere, would decide to pull off some guffaw-worthy acrobatic antics. That scene is near the end of book three in the series, Public Anchovy Number One, which hits bookstore shelves on December 26th. Hope you’ll find it as LOL-able reading as I did writing.

  • Thanks for nothin’, J.R.R. Tolkien – More of my interview with audiobook narrator Holly Adams

    When I’m thinking up a new character for one of books, I tend to give a lot of thought to how the person talks. In the Deep Dish Mysteries, for example, you know that if someone says, “For Pete’s sake…” that’s Wisconsin farmgirl Melody Schacht. And if a character busts out a witty play on words that makes you laugh and groan at the same time, that’ll be straight from the mouth of sous chef/BFF Sonya. I’m also fascinated by accents, especially unusual ones like the dialect of North Carolina’s Outer Banks, which features heavily in A Death in Duck, from my Mount Moriah Mysteries Series.

    As I’m inventing this panoply of distinctive voices, I should probably spare a thought for my longtime collaborator, audiobook narrator Holly Adams. Over the years, Holly has gamely voiced whatever characters I’ve thrown her way. From a gravelly old man on his deathbed to a toddler squeaking out her first complete sentences. A lesser narrator might balk, but not Holly. Bulgarian accent? Sure. Mobster with a pro wrestler physique and a hockey mom inflection? Bring it on. I’m lucky to have her talent at my disposal. Holly has previously shared some of her secrets for giving each character a unique voice. But coming up with accents and voices isn’t the only challenge audiobook narrators face.

    In addition to cozy mysteries like mine, Holly records a lot of non-fiction and a LOT of fantasy books. It never occurred to me how challenging it is for a narrator to cope with page after page of made-up names and places. Can you imagine being handed a book from the Game of Thrones series and having to say Daenerys Targaryen five times fast? Harder still, in her non-fiction work, she has to cope with real people’s names in languages that she doesn’t natively speak. In those instances, she has to be even more diligent about getting things right, because there are actual people (besides the author) who’ll know if she gets it wrong.

  • Chop n’ Bop Playlist: Girl Power Anthems for Cooking

    To celebrate the publication of Six Feet Deep Dish, I was invited to write a guest post for the awesome mystery blog, Criminal Element. Read on for more on writing, music, and my uncanny similarity to Olympic gold medal swimmer Michael Phelps.

    Before a big race, swimmer Michael Phelps listened to a playlist to amp up his energy, increase his focus, and get in the zone. Maybe you can picture him, headphones on, bopping his chin to a beat that was audible only to him. I’m exactly the same. You heard it here, people. Michael Phelps and I are basically the same person. Except instead of setting world records for a sub-two-minute 100m butterfly and going for gold as the most decorated Olympian of all time, I write novels about a fat cat and pizzas.

    Read more about girl power anthems and my (essentially) twin, Michael Phelps…

    https://www.criminalelement.com/chop-n-bop-playlist-girl-power-anthems-for-cooking/

  • “You never know when your pizza cat mystery will come along.”

    I do not recommend trying to become a writer.

    In fact, I’m not even sure I know what “becoming a writer” is. When I published the first Lindsay Harding novel, did that make me a writer? Or was it the brief and shining moment when the first book climbed to the top of Amazon’s cozy mystery rankings for a couple of days? Or when I got my first royalty check? Maybe it was when I won my first writing contest. Does the fact of having published three novels and half a dozen short stories mean that I’ve permanently achieved writerdom? Or if I cease to publish but still write, do I remain a writer?

    These questions plagued me toward the end of 2018. (Remember 2018, when existential angst could involve mundane things like career aspirations?) I’d decided that 2019 was going to be a decisive year for my writing. I vowed to “become a writer” by age 40. Despite my progress toward that goal, by October 2019 my 41st birthday loomed, and I still felt like an impostor. After a few decent earnings years, my royalty income had dwindled to pocket change. I’d finished a manuscript for my middle-grade adventure novel, MINERVA MURGATROYD AND THE VERY OLD BOY, but after several near misses, I was unable to find representation for it. I blew out the candles on my 41st birthday with a heavy heart. Forty had come and gone with no real progress toward my writing goal. My day job had ramped up and I felt pressure to follow the steady paycheck and turn my back on my writing hobby.

    And then, two days after my 41st birthday, I got a message from Lyndee Walker, a bestselling mystery novelist I’d met at a few conferences over the years. Lyndee had heard from her agent that St. Martin’s press was looking to develop a new mystery series. She didn’t have time to pitch for it herself, but she remembered me and thought I might be a good fit for the project. All she knew was that it was on the very cozy end of the mystery spectrum–it needed to be set in a pizza restaurant and to prominently feature a cat. The marketing folks had already road tested the concept and found that “Pizza Cat Mystery” was a niche that needed to be filled. Now, they just needed to find a writer who could pull the project off.

    When I told my sister about this unexpected opportunity, she reminded me how only weeks earlier, I’d decided to throw in the towel on my writing dreams. “You never know when your pizza cat mystery will come along,” has since become our family’s version of “Persistence pays off.”

    Fast forward to March of this year. After a couple of setbacks, including the departure of a key editor at the press, I was offered a three-book deal for a new series set in a deep-dish pizza restaurant. The first book, tentatively titled SIX FEET DEEP DISH, is set to come out in Summer 2022.

    The advance still doesn’t justify giving up my day job and becoming a full-time writer, but it’s a respectable supplement to our family’s income that might allow us to redo our tacky master bathroom next year.

    So am I a writer now? <<shrugs>> Ask me when I’m 50.

  • Two thumbs up for cozy mysteries

    To a kid growing up in Chicago in the 1980s, the Chicago Sun Times film critic Roger Ebert was the fount of all wisdom. His weekly Siskel and Ebert: At the Movies PBS show, with its famous Thumbs Up-Thumbs Down scoring system, was in regular rotation on lazy Saturday mornings, when my sister and I would flop in front of the TV with bowls of cereal. Because it was the 80s, our mother let us add spoonsful of white sugar to our Cheerios and eat them along with big glasses of milk sweetened with Hershey’s syrup. Apparently, in the 80s, everyone had magical pancreases.

    But back to Ebert. This bespectacled, almost cartoonishly jowly Midwesterner somehow embodied the personality traits of a sharp-witted pundit, a polymath genius, and a four-year-old at a birthday party. His arguments with his co-host were literate, civilized precursors to the hair-clawing, manicure-ruining brawls that populate today’s reality TV. Their arguments were every bit as viscous and sometimes even personal, but their disagreements also expanded minds and showed that it was possible for even well-intentioned experts to disagree.

    I recently rediscovered that Saturday morning slice of my childhood when I saw Life Itself, a documentary that chronicles Ebert’s diagnosis with jaw cancer, and the aftermath of the disfiguring surgery that spared his life but destroyed both his face and his ability to speak. The documentary is wonderful, even for those who lack the childhood attachment I have. The film is chock-full of touching, profound, hilarious revelations, but it was one quote, as Ebert discussed his scathing review of Blue Velvet, that has stuck with me for weeks:

    “Drama holds a mirror up to life, but needn’t reproduce it.”

    For Ebert, Blue Velvet’s sadomasochistic depiction of Isabella Rossalini’s character, and by extension the actress herself, crossed a line between art/drama and exploitation. This brought me back to the struggles I had in choosing a comfortable genre in which to write. After my first agent unsuccessfully shopped the Mount Moriah cozy mystery series, she advised that I switch gears and write Romantic Suspense, which she assured me would sell more easily. That genre, also known as “woman in peril” usually features dangerous, even psychopathic, criminals and gritty scenes of life-threatening action. Following my agent’s advice, I started a novel about a female psychiatrist who treated patients suffering from severe phobias using 3D virtual reality immersion. Similar to the villain in the movie Se7en, my baddie was killing my heroine’s patients one-by-one by reproducing the circumstances of their virtual immersions in real life. Terrified of spiders? Well, you’d find yourself trapped in a room full of tarantulas. And so on. Pretty good plot, eh?

    Here’s the thing, though. When I worked on that book, I felt gross. It was hard to edit, because I didn’t like going back reading what I’d written. Yes, those horrible things—mental illness, murder, torture, cruelty, happen. But I didn’t want to be the one to give voice to those things. So, I chucked that idea, dropped the agent, and published the Mount Moriah books myself with Nicole Loughan’s Little Spot imprint. There are murders in my books, and baddies. And things like domestic abuse and prejudice are not glossed over. But I try not to hold my reader’s gaze on them for too long, and I never want to inflict unnecessary suffering on my characters. Mostly, my books try to radiate positive energy. Sometimes, when I read a passage I haven’t read in a long time, it will still make me chuckle. That’s the vibe I’m most comfortable putting out in the world.

    I’ll leave it to others to meticulously reproduce mass starvation, individual privation, war atrocities, and child abuse. Turns out when I hold up a mirror to life, I want to hold a fun house mirror.

  • How to Write a Really Terrible Mystery

    On October 28th, I’ll be giving a talk at the Blacksburg, VA Public Library. “How to Write a Really Terrible Mystery (and HowHow to Write a Really Terrible Mystery Poster Not To)” will feature tips from my alter ego, Mandy Quagley. Below is a little sneak peek at the kind of colossally unhelpful advice Mandy will give to mystery readers and would-be mystery writers.

    There will be lots of audience participation, and lots more terribly hilarious writing samples. Hope to see you there!

    GO FOR THE SCOOBY DOO ENDING

    Instead of laying cunning clues that lead your reader little by little toward the finale, withhold all information. I mean, this is a mystery, people! Be mysterious. You don’t want to give anything away. So at the end, dump all the information on your reader like a trash collector tipping his load into a fetid landfill.

    Take one or more chapters right at the end to reveal in excruciating detail who committed all the murders and how they did it. Ideally, they should do this in one really, really long monologue while your protagonist is tied to a chair or something, but I know this isn’t always possible. A good rule of thumb is that this exposition should recap your entire book.

    Here’s a quick example from The Weiner Schnitzel Conundrum by Mandy Quagley:

    “Remember that jar of poisoned pickles in the first chapter?” Baron Otto Von Killerstein said, stroking his menacing goatee. “Well, they weren’t poisoned after all!  That character just had a heart attack, you fool! But actually that gave me the idea to poison those pickles in Chapter Five. The ones the other character ate.”

    “You mean Count Nebulous Throckmorton died from eating poisoned pickles?” Juliette asked, her blonde curls quivering with fear.

    “Nine, he’s the one who got bitten by the snake. Don’t you remember? I just told you about the snake I trained specially to be attracted to the scent of mango chutney, and then I gave Count Throckmorton the mango chutney scented cologne?”

    “Oh, oui. So it was Professor Leopold von Fingerschweitzen who ate the poisoned pickles.”

    “Nine! Think about it. Chapter Five? The one with the redhead and the hunchback?”

    “Wait, you mean you and Bavaria Bumbersnickle were working together this whole time?” Juliette asked, her ample bosom jiggling with anxiety.

    Baron Von Killerstein pulled back the cleverly fitted mask that covered his face. “I am Bavaria Bumbersnickle!”