My First Cozy Mystery? | A Deadly Inside Scoop by Abby Collette

Title: A Deadly Inside Scoop
Series: Ice Cream Parlor Mystery #1
Author: Abby Collette
Published: May 12, 2020
Genre(s): Mystery/Thriller
Page Count: 384
Rating:

Summary from Goodreads:

Recent MBA grad Bronwyn Crewse has just taken over her family's ice cream shop in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, and she's going back to basics. Win is renovating Crewse Creamery to restore its former glory, and filling the menu with delicious, homemade ice cream flavors—many from her grandmother’s original recipes. But unexpected construction delays mean she misses the summer season, and the shop has a literal cold opening: the day she opens her doors an early first snow descends on the village and keeps the customers away.

To make matters worse, that evening, Win finds a body in the snow, and it turns out the dead man was a grifter with an old feud with the Crewse family. Soon, Win’s father is implicated in his death. It's not easy to juggle a new-to-her business while solving a crime, but Win is determined to do it. With the help of her quirky best friends and her tight-knit family, she'll catch the ice cold killer before she has a meltdown...

The important thing to note here is that A Deadly Inside Scoop is the first cozy mystery I’ve ever read, though it’s been a genre I’ve wanted to get into since roughly 2015. So. I am not at all familiar with the tropes and conventions of cozies, so this is an outsider viewpoint.

Collette’s set-up here is cute. Win Crewse is back in Ohio after a stint in New York and ready to re-open her grandparents’ ice cream parlor—except she stumbles over a dead body the very day of the grand reopening. Not to mention the sleepy suburb’s one and only homicide detective has zeroed in on Win’s dad as his main suspect. With her Agatha Raisin-obsessed best friend, Win tries to get to the bottom of the murder and clear her father’s name, while also trying to keep her fledgling business afloat.

It sounds super adorable, right?

Except…no.

My main complaint with this book is that there’s very little “investigation” that goes on. Almost the entire first half of the book is spent showing (in exhausting detail) the day-to-day operations of Win’s ice cream shop. Who works there, what the customers order, what flavors are on sale, what the interior of the parlor looks like, etc. I appreciate that this is the first book in a series, and so Collette wants to establish her protagonist’s “home base,” but goodness. I absolutely did not need an endless recap of how many customers came into the store. It had very little narrative value and just made the plot feel sluggish.

Around the halfway point is when the mystery portion of A Deadly Inside Scoop comes into play. I liked this bit, mostly. The author was good at laying out the evidence and potential suspects, and her writing was clear and easy to follow along with. At the same time…this book is a bit…silly? And overly simplistic? And naive? Police officers do not call up random law professors to ask the professors how to do their jobs. They just don’t. Little things like this were peppered throughout the story, and just made me go “huh???” a lot. And like, yes, I 100% get that cozy mysteries are not meant to attain the same “realism” that a more hard-boiled police procedural novel supposedly achieves, but surely one can tell a light-hearted murder mystery and keep things true to life?

Additionally, I was so disappointed by Win Crewse, our sleuth. The author tells her readers that Win is smart and snappy and has a good head on her shoulders, but this is not evidenced at all in the text. Mostly, Win is led around by the nose by her very silly friend, Maisie, who seems to think that real life is exactly the same as an episode of CSI. Throughout A Deadly Inside Scoop, I saw Win bumble around and ask a lot of question that had (in my opinion) obvious answers. Whatever “clues” she uncovers always seem to be discovered accidentally or to just miraculously fall into her lap. I never saw Win act like a spunky, capable business owner out to solve a crime, which I believe is what most cozy mystery protagonists are supposed to be.

So with a detective who’s no good at detecting, and a story that’s too-focused on loving descriptions of artisanal ice cream, how could this possibly be a satisfying mystery?

Honestly, it wasn’t.

I do really enjoy a good mystery novel from time to time, and I don’t want to write off an entire subgenre, but… I’m wondering if the things I found so frustrating about A Deadly Inside Scoop are supposed to be a feature and not a bug of a good cozy mystery. In any event, this certainly wasn’t a book for me. I loved the set-up of the series as a whole, but on a more fundamental storytelling level, I don’t think Abby Collette succeeded here.