This has the exact kind of setup that makes a cozy mystery easy to settle into. Clara Whitman leaves a failing marriage and Boston winters behind for Sunny Shores, Florida, where she is trying to rebuild her life around a pink 1972 flower truck. It is cheerful, specific and just a little eccentric, which means the murder lands exactly where a cozy reader wants it to: right in the middle of a world that already feels fun to spend time in.
The dead woman is Sunny Shores’ other florist, Sherri Sanford, and Clara has already had a very public clash with her. Suddenly a business rivalry looks like motive. What keeps the book from feeling like a puzzle sitting by itself is the company Clara has around her: Paisley, her boundary-free sixty-something roommate, Herbie the Brussels Griffon, Detective Gabriel Cypress, a Garden Club full of secrets and a whole town that seems to be growing more than flowers.
This is one for readers who want a mystery without having to live in darkness for three hundred pages. Tara Lush leans into humor, found family, midlife reinvention, a little slow-burn romantic energy and zero-gore coziness. It is the kind of book you pick up for the murder and keep reading because you like the people and want another afternoon in their town.