By: Catalina Santorini
N.E. Carlisle won the 2025 Firebird Book Award for Cozy Mystery and the PenCraft Book Award for Best Fiction in Mystery-Sleuth with the first Bonne Année Mystery, Hazelnuts and Homicide, and the achievement reflected something more than the book’s considerable entertainment value. It reflected the quality of a writer who had found not just a formula for a popular genre but a genuine creative home, a specific place and a specific protagonist and a specific community sensibility that she inhabits with the kind of comfortable authority that takes years to develop and that, once developed, produces exactly the reading experience that cozy mystery fans return to the genre to find. Books, Bunnies, and a Body delivers that experience again and then goes a little further, deepening the world of Hazelton and the relationships within it in ways that make the series feel like it is building toward something rather than simply continuing.
Spring in Hazelton is rendered with the loving attention to seasonal atmosphere that Carlisle’s writing consistently brings to its setting, the chocolate bunnies on order, the Peter Rabbit tea and brunch in planning, the particular quality of a coastal Oregon spring that makes the promise of warmth feel genuinely earned rather than simply arrived. Année’s bookshop and event space, The Literary Table, is at the center of the community’s seasonal preparations, and the work of rescuing first editions and treasured classics from shuttered shops and estate sales that keeps Année busy gives the book one of its most affecting thematic threads. Books often outlive the people who loved them, and someone has to decide where they go next. In Hazelton, that someone is Année, and the meditation on what it means to inherit a beloved object from a life that is over gives the novel a depth and a tenderness that lift it above the entertaining puzzle it is also simultaneously being.
The murder that disrupts spring’s promise arrives through the egg hunt, as the series tagline has it, with the dry wit that Carlisle brings to the whole enterprise. The egg hunt is a Hazelton tradition. So is murder, apparently. That line captures both the genre and the series in perfect miniature, the acknowledgment of the formula’s inherent absurdity combined with the genuine craft that makes the formula deliver consistent pleasure despite its conventions.
Oscar the Bernedoodle earns every appearance he makes, the wedding subplot gives the community an emotional investment in resolution beyond the usual desire for justice, and the recipes that close the book are as warmly offered as everything else in Carlisle’s fictional world. This is a series that knows exactly what it is and executes that knowledge with consistent and generous skill.
If you love award-winning cozy mysteries with bookshop settings, lovable animal companions, small-town community warmth, and recipes you will actually want to make, Books, Bunnies, and a Body by N.E. Carlisle is your next essential read. Head over to Amazon and get your copy today and return to Hazelton, where spring is lovely and the mystery is always worth solving.
