6 Cozy Mystery Books Like The Thursday Murder Club

Susan Melville had everything as the wealthy daughter of a prominent wealthy family. So when all of her wealth disappears and she loses her apartment, she’s despondent.

She decides to kill herself, but in the most dramatic way possible: killing herself at a society event. But when she finds the man who stole her apartment from her, she ends up shooting him instead.

It turns out that she wasn’t the only one who wanted him dead.

A young man helps her leave the party, before anyone knows the businessman is dead. The young man had been hired to kill the businessman himself.

Now she finds herself with a new career as an assassin with a competitive advantage: people don’t pay attention to middle-aged women. On top of that, her family lineage gives her access to places that other assassins don’t.

It’s the first in three-book Miss Melville series.

Rachel Walker does the unimaginable: she joins her school’s Parent-Teacher Association WhatsApp. It’s a place where reputations are made and destroyed with a few text messages and a badly timed emoji.

She gets drawn into the PTA’s bake sale. As stressful as it is, everything becomes 100 times worse when a fellow parent dies after the bake sale due to a poisoned cake.

And since Rachel was the last person to message the group, she’s the number one suspect.

She teams up with her friends, Jane and Frankie, to figure out who really poisoned the woman’s cake.

And if you love this book, you should definitely check out its sequel, Unlucky for Some.

Yes, it’s the series we knew we wanted: The Golden Girls Cozy Mystery series.

Rose has found herself in a pickle. She’s putting together her cousin Nettie’s wedding, trying to incorporate as many St. Olaf traditions as possible without putting off the groom’s family.

Money, marriage, and her cousin’s future happiness are at stake.

Dorothy doesn’t want to attend the impending nuptials by herself, so she tries a new dating service: VHS. But the date goes sour when her plus one is found dead, head planted in a cheese cake at Rose’s carefully planned tea-and-fish themed party at the start to the celebrations.

Now with everything on the line, Rose, Dorothy, Blanche, and Sofia have to find out who really killed Dorothy’s date before Dorothy finds herself wedded to a prison sentence.

Death on the Lanai, the second book, comes out in June.

Social media influencer Maddy Montgomery was supposed to be a happily married doctor’s wife. Instead, she’s single and humiliated and flying to the middle of nowhere to find out about her Great Aunt’s will, a woman she never met.

Upon her meeting with her Great Aunt’s attorney, Maddie has inherited her Great Aunt’s estate…on three conditions.

First, she has to live in her Great Aunt’s house in New Bison, Michigan. Second, she has to run her Great Aunt’s bakery, Baby Cakes Bakery.

Lastly, she has to take care of Baby, an English Mastiff. For a year.

Maddy isn’t sure she is up to the challenge, or whether she even wants the challenge to begin with. She’s never had to run anything in her life, and she knows next to nothing about baking or caring for a giant dog.

But her Great Aunt’s friends seem keen to help. However, when the mayor is inexplicably found in the bakery, stabbed, Maddy realizes she’s in even more hot water than before.

Teaming up with the self-named Baker Street Irregulars, they are going to find the who, what, and why behind the murder.

It’s a delightful series as we watch Maddy become more self-assured and confident. Book five, Murder at First Slice, is due for release in July.

Olivia Beech had it all —a great job, fame, and fortune—all thanks to her genius as a sommelier. Until COVID-19 took it all from her when she lost her sense of taste.

Now she’s out of the job and out of money and flying to Paris, France for the chance for a new start. Celebrity chef Jacques de Bizet is looking to hire her as his bistro’s new sommelier.

When she shows up, he’s laid out a spread of wine for her to try and rate for her job interview. She knows that she still has an acute sense of smell that might get her through the challenge, but nothing prepares her for when Jacques collapses after a sip of the wine—the very wine she was supposed to drink—and dies.

Now she’s in a foreign country with no friends or resources and a dead man.

Thankfully, Olivia is not alone; the Paris Neighborhood Watch is there to help her and get justice for Jacques de Bizet.

It’s a wonderful ensemble cast including a retired agoraphobic detective, a feisty florist, and a patisserie owner.

This book will be released on May 26th.

Vera Wong is the owner of the World Famous Tea Shop in San Francisco’s Chinatown, except no one really knows it. She tries to spend her days delivering tea to her one customer and scheming to get her son married.

But she gets a new purpose in life when she finds a man dead in the middle of her tea shop one morning. As the police shut down the shop to search for clues, several unexpected people showed up at the shop.

With her carefully honed instincts as a Chinese mother, Vera befriends all of these younger folk, certain that they all knew the dead man and may have been responsible for his untimely demise.

It’s a story of found friends and a clever cast of characters who together get to the bottom of the mystery.

The second book, Vera Wong's Guide to Snooping (On a Dead Man) is out now, with news that a third book will be coming soon.