Tearoom Mysteries

Find a comfy chair, raise a cup of fragrant, freshly brewed tea to your lips, and settle down for murder and mayhem in a mystery novel set in a tearoom for a delightful form of armchair travel.

Pick the setting of your choice—Charleston, England’s Cotswolds, Cape Cod, or Pennsylvania’s Amish Country—and tearoom décor that fits you to a T—a brick fireplace, candles, and mismatched china in Charleston’s historic district; a 15th-century Tudor-style half-timbered, thatched-roof former inn near Oxford University; another decorated like a stately English country home perched on a bluff overlooking Cape Cod Bay; or a pale-green Victorian house in a Lancaster County tourist town.

You won’t find hard-boiled, heavy-drinking, world-weary male sleuths pickled in cynicism, often from law enforcement backgrounds, here, nor dialogue packed with curse words, voyeur-like descriptions of corpses and killing methods and scenes strictly X-rated. Instead, you’ll find the part-time sleuth is a genteel woman tearoom owner you’d like to meet and often can identify with—and with recipes to boot.

Tearoom mysteries are “cozy mysteries,” a very popular mystery with themes, which can be bakeries, crafting, bookstores, gardening, animals, or the paranormal, to name a few. “It’s so relaxing to dive into a cozy mystery, where it feels like you’re visiting old friends at their beautiful tea house or delicious bakery, and you know the last page of the book will be tied with a nice little