Where to Start with Olivia Blacke: A New Lease on Mysteries

Coming out October 29th, A New Lease on Death is the first in her Supernatural series.

Cordelia Graves finds her neighbor’s body outside her apartment building. Instead of calling the police, she talks to his new corpse since she too has been dead for several months.

While everyone thinks it's just a deadly mugging, Cordelia decides to investigate but she needs the living woman named Ruby who moved into Cordelia’s former apartment to help.

Even if Ruby can’t keep her houseplants alive. Even if Cordelia isn’t entirely sure how to communicate. Misunderstandings and missteps abound.

While her first two series are cozies, A New Lease is definitely not a cozy mystery.

When asked why Blacke went a little darker, she explained, “I am a snarky person by nature, and I absolutely love whenever I get a review, it's like, ‘this is snarky because, yeah, that's really what I was going for.”

You can't get too snarky in a cozy. So I love writing cozies because these are fun to write. They're fun to read, but I kind of like throwing a little bit of snark and a little bit of spice. I kind of have a dark sense of humor.”

She explained that “It's very clear this is not a cozy. [In the first chapter,] I start with a dead guy on the sidewalk, and he sits up and starts having conversations with a ghost. The dead guy figures out he's dead after putting his finger in the bullet hole in the middle of his forehead, which for me, is funny, but it's also a little bit too dark for cozy.”

When asked the difference between funny and darkly funny, Blacke provided the apt example, “Funny is tripping over a Lego in the middle of the night. Darkly funny is tripping over a dead body in the middle of the night.”

In her three book Record Shop Mystery series, Juni Jessup and her sisters Tansy and Maggie have decided to open their own record and coffee shop in a small town close to Austin Texas.

While Juni loves making music themed beverages each day like Java Be Good, she doesn't love finding the body of a woman in a supply closet during their grand opening.

Now their shop is closed before it really opens and her ex-boyfriend, now a police officer, has arrested their uncle for the crime. With the help of her sisters, Juni is going to figure out whodunnit so they can get their show on the road.

In addition to all the puns, Blacke’s other favorite part of the series is the family dynamic.

She explained, “In a lot of cozy mysteries, you've got the amateur sleuth either trying to get around the cops or she's sneaking in places that she shouldn't be, and maybe she's got this one wacky best friend that's like, ‘maybe I'll come along with you.’ Here I was able to give two sisters to the main character, so one of them could say, ‘Hey, I will sneak into that place with you.’ And every sister is like, ‘I think we shouldn't be sneaking into this place at midnight with their killer around.’” 

The sisters can act as foils in every scene. If one sister likes one of Juni’s boyfriends, the other sister hates him, or vice versa.

Blacke said, “I really liked how fun it was to be able to incorporate their family dynamic. You’ve three sisters that are working together, [but] one of which is really pushy, and the main character's kind of a pushover and one is her comforting sister. It was a lot of fun to be able to work that relationship in and then see how that actually made the plot go forward.”

The two-book Brooklyn Murder Mystery series focuses on Louisiana native Odessa Dean who is spending three months taking care of her aunt’s apartment and cat in Brooklyn.

She loves being in the big city but Brooklyn is expensive! She ends up getting a job in a bookstore/craft beer cafe.

But when her coworker and aspiring Youtuber falls to her death, accidently captured in a flash mob marriage proposal video, Odessa decides to investigate her coworker’s untimely death.

Olivia Blacke explained that she likes to bend or break the rules. In many cozy series, there’s usually a woman who lives in a big city—and then something happens. Often it's a divorce or a death in the family, and the woman ends up moving back home to a small town where she opens up a bakery, yarn shop, etc.

She said, “So I wanted to flip the script on the head, and I still get a fish out of water [story] but now it's this young girl who's barely been out of Louisiana suddenly dropped in the middle of New York City.”

It’s her love letter to the city.

Blacke explained that while NY is a big city, there are neighborhoods everywhere. “You start seeing the same people over and over again. There's 30,000 coffee shops to choose from, and you go to the same one every day. There's 50 bookstores, and you go to the same one every day. Eventually people start recognizing you and talking to you,” she said.

“These little neighborhoods are these cozy communities, and it doesn't seem like it at first, but they really are.”

So check out Olivia Blacke’s three series and don’t forget to pre-order your copy of A New Lease on Death.

Blacke wants everyone to know that the book is not a cozy story but it’s funny. It’s a ghost story but not a scary one. It’s a funny ghost story.