I really enjoy the genre of cozy mysteries, nice easy to read stories without gore, overt violence, sex or foul language.  Even the obligatory murder for a murder mystery happens “off camera”, and only the body is found.  Most of these mysteries today have a theme, and many of them are ones I like, such as quilting, sewing, needlework, tea or coffee shops, cooking, stamping and more.  I found new-to-me a series recently, and I am really enjoying it.   It is a cozy mystery series with a quilting theme.   The books are written in an easy to read style, with lots of quilting thrown in.  There are some tips here and there too.  One tip I found particularly appropriate was that quilters usually do not have enough lights in their stash, so every time you buy fabric you should throw in a yard of a light to round out your stash.  Good advice!

The first book, Quilt As Desired, starts out with the main character, Harriet Truman, coming back to Foggy Point so she can keep a business running while her Aunt Beth is on a cruise.  Instead, she finds out after her aunt leaves that she has in fact retired and left Harriet the business and her house.   When Aunt Beth’s best friend, Avanell, is murdered, and her own studio trashed, Harriet must figure out what is going on before the killer strikes again.    Harriet is thrown into the investigation with Avanell’s son, Aiden, and he quickly becomes smitten with her.  However, Harriet is having none of it.  She is still reeling from being suddenly widowed five years earlier by a husband who didn’t tell her about his fatal illness.   But the Loose Threads quilting group welcomes her and helps her to begin to heal that wound.

In the second book, Quilter’s Knot, Harriet and the Loose Threads go to a retreat.  One of the members, Lauren, is attending a longer program in original design to stop the rumors of her copying other quilter’s work.  However, Aunt Beth thinks she saw an identical quilt to Lauren’s work while she was in Europe.  Lauren believes the school owner has in fact copied Lauren, and wants Harriet to prove it.  But when the owner is killed, it is up to Harriet to prove Lauren is innocent, and she doesn’t even like Lauren.

The third installment, Quilt As You Go, has Harriet and the Loose Threads making quilts in Civil War reproductions to sell at the local reenactment and street fair.  When one of the ‘soldiers’ doesn’t get up after the ‘battle’, Harriet is dismayed to find he is dead.  Not only that, but he was married to one of the Loose Threads and was thought to have died 20 years ago.  Of course there is a quilt involved, that appears without warning in Mavis’ house, a quilt she made for that husband years earlier and hadn’t seen since before he ‘died’.  There is a lot to sort out here, including finding out about a stranger that appears to be interested in Carla, another Loose Threads member.  The romance between Harriet and Aiden heats up a little too.

The books are quick reads, and are printed in trade paperback size with print you can actually see.  There are three more in the series, and I look forward to reading them as well.

Have you read any of this series?