Karen L. Mead

Once upon a time, a mystery author woke up and said “You know what would work really well? Writing a cozy mystery about someone who bakes cookies and cakes and stuff. Women would totally get into the baking food porn-aspect while they watch the heroine solve the mystery.” At a different time (but not that far removed from the first one), a mystery author woke up and said “You know what would work really well? Writing a cozy mystery where the heroine is a witch. Then she could use her magical powers to solve the mystery!”

And the mystery authors saw that this was good, thus they persisted to do a lot of these two things….separately.

Then one day, Danielle Garrett woke up and said “You know what? Why not have a heroine who bakes AND is also a witch? Also she can talk to animals, just because.”

And thus was born the Sugar Shack Witch Mysteries.

Okay, to be fair, I don’t know if this is literally the very first cozy mystery series to combine baking and the paranormal (and knowing just how many of these series there are, it’s probably not), but it’s the first one I’ve personally come across with this combination, so it’s at least fairly novel. It does come with some conditions though; heroine Rosella Midnight (what an urban fantasy name!) doesn’t really like baking and is only working at her family’s Sugar Shack bakery until she gets back on her feet with her writing career, so there isn’t all that much dessert food porn. It’s more like, she plops blobs of unspecified cookie dough onto a tray and bakes them. That does not really get me salivating.

It’s also a magical separatist society, like Harry Potter: Only magical people live in Winterspell Lake, which is hidden with oodles of magic to keep all those pesky normal people away. To me, one of the most interesting things about urban fantasy is watching the magical world coexist with the real world, so the fact that everyone is magical is kind of a negative for me on general principle, but it works well enough for this particular story.

The most interesting part of the story for me is the fact that Rosella has weird powers for a witch. She can communicate with animals, something no one else in her magical community can do. The townspeople, considering her a cursed witch, fear that she may actually have a more broad-based telepathy that would allow her to control people. So she’s been shunned by many of the people in Winterspell, leading her to go live in the “real” world for most of her 20s. So I do get a little bit of magic-in-the-real-world, but then Rosella loses her job at a Portland newspaper and it’s back to Winterspell. Oh well.

As a former newspaper reporter myself, I’m always tickled by how often mystery protagonists start out as reporters. I guess it’s an easy way to give someone mystery-solving skills without having to literally make them a detective.

Anyway, since Rosella’s powers involve mainly talking to rodents, she’s not very useful in a fight. This means other characters have to step in when the situation calls for firepower, which leads to an interesting dynamic. I like it when a protagonist is limited in what they can do; it gets boring when the characters are powerful enough to blast everything to bits on their own (which makes me wonder why I keep reading The Wicked Witches of the Midwest, but that’s another post).

I wish this series featured more details of baking, but I should probably just be reading dessert cookbooks at this point and that’s my problem. I recommend it to fans of cozy mysteries and paranormal tales. The plot didn’t knock my socks off, but everything came together well and piqued my interest for the next book in the series.

Actually, now I’m wondering why I don’t start writing a story about a baking witch, if I like the idea so much. I think if I started to do that, I’d just have the heroine endlessly mastering her pineapple-upside-down-cake recipe while the perp just went out and murdered 20 people. But hey, that’s kind of a unique vibe, right?