Getting into the Spirit: 8 Spooky Graveyard Cozy Mysteries

While it’s the fifth book in the Witch City Mystery series, it’s well worth a read even if you haven’t read the first four. Lee Barrett has psychic powers, which still unnerve her, but have proven useful in the past. They come in handy when her production class at Tabitha Trumbull’s Academy of Arts decides to do a project on Día De Los Muertos, interviewing folks, researching the cemetery, and more. But one student, Dorothy, is keen to use the opportunity to find out what happened to her sister who allegedly overdosed. Dorothy believes she was murdered, and when Lee starts to have visions and clues pop up, it seems that Dorothy may be right.  

Vintage clothing and ghosts? Sign me up!  Cookie Chanel keeps herself busy; she owns a vintage clothing shop called It’s Vintage Y’all and she can talk to ghosts. In the seventh book of A Haunted Vintage Mystery, she gets an unusual assignment: provide vintage clothing for a photo shoot in a cemetery. But the photographer has not been making friends—so much so that someone decides he should stay in the cemetery forever. Chanel and her new ghost pal from the 1920s have to figure out which person killed the unpopular person.

While most people know Ellis Peters for her Brother Cadfael books, she wrote another series around Detective Inspector George Felse. When you open someone’s grave, you expect to find their corpse. It’s an entirely different matter when you find a second body.  In this third installment of the Felse Investigations series, Felse is brought into the case near Maymouth when a famous centuries-old grave yields two bodies instead one—and neither corpse is the one that is supposed to be there. Felse has to figure out what dark secrets lie in this little pocket of Cornwall.

For a change of pace, here’s one cozy that takes place in catacombs. With the murder of her coworker in the past, Nora Blake is loving her job as a performer for the murder mystery dinners at Castle Dark. What’s not to love? She gets to act and live in this magnificent castle, and even act in the local theater’s production of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. When Castle Dark puts on a special event for the cast of the play, the curtain closes for good for one member of the cast in the catacombs of the castle. Blake decides to investigate, suspecting that his death is somehow connected to the play. Will the show continue on? Or will the stage darken for the cast? 

In the second book of the Florida Keys Bed & Breakfast Cozy Mystery series, Eva Stewart loves running her Bed and Breakfast in the Florida Keyes and attending her murder mystery book club. She’s not so fond of finding herself in real mysteries. But what do you do when you find a dead body in a cemetery? Solve the case, of course. With the help of her book club, one of whom knew the deceased, she’ll try to dig up the truth on the murderer.

While graveyards are known for having bodies, it’s less common to find a newly deceased body left above ground. Siobhán O’Sullivan has just become garda for her small town of Kilbane; the elusive Detective Sergeant Macdara Flannery has left for Dublin. But O’Sullivan does not get to ease into her job when the priest finds the body of an unknown man in the graveyard in the snow. As if that isn’t challenging enough, Detective Sergeant Flannery is sent to help O’Sullivan to find out the identity of the man and his killer. It’s the Third in An Irish Village Mystery series.

While it’s a bit unconventional to have a wedding next to a cemetery, it’s Halloween! Even more important, writer Viola Roberts is thrilled to be attending her best friend’s wedding in the ninth installment of the Viola Roberts Cozy Mystery series. But instead of the spotlight on the wedded couple, a body is discovered, and the finger of fate points to someone at the wedding. Can Viola save the day, or will the wedded couple find themselves separated indefinitely?

While the Thursday Murder Club at the local retirement community had intended to solve cold cases, they hadn’t expected to have several land in their lap. Cooper Chase is not a popular man; he’s a developer who will stop at nothing to make a quick buck…er pound. That includes digging up an old cemetery of nuns. But when a recent body is found at the cemetery and the developer himself ends up dead, intrepid Elizabeth leads the club to solve the case, working with a reluctant police officer. But as they dive into the case, Joyce, Ibrahim, and Ron begin to realize that Elizabeth seems to have an unusual set of skills and contacts inconsistent with her past… The third book in the series called The Bullet That Missed was just published.