Mysteryrat’s Maze on King’s River Life
One of the characteristics of cozy mystery stories is that they juxtapose light and dark in interesting ways. On the dark side, there’s usually a murder, and murders invariably have dark energy behind them—greed, avarice, hatred, jealousy, revenge. On the lighter side, protagonists are often amateurs who are either very nice, very funny, or both, people who bring fresh and sometimes inept eyes to the situations they encounter.
I was thinking about that when I began my Sydney Riley mystery series. There was a lot to juggle: I wanted every book to reveal something unexpected about the culture and history of Provincetown, which is where they all take place; I wanted to present readers with an interesting and challenging plot; and I wanted characters who might bring a little light relief to the story.
The beginning of a series is always a challenge because you’re making decisions that will have a lot of repercussions down the line—anything you choose now, you’ll be stuck with! So I gave a lot of thought to what I could give Sydney by way of a job, and landed on wedding planner. That served several purposes: it gave her a flexible schedule (it’s hard to solve murders when you’re working nine-to-five!), it presented her with the opportunity to meet and interact with a broad range of people, and it might provide a little light relief as she dealt with all the personalities and problems that come with weddings.
I know them well: Provincetown is a wedding destination, and I’m licensed to perform weddings, which has become pretty much my “summer gig.” Couples have always come here for the beauty of the area, and after Massachusetts led the nation in marriage equality in 2004, it became an even bigger destination, now including same-sex couples eager to tie the knot. Most of our weddings are low-key affairs on the beach at sunset or at the little-known almost-hidden garden in town, but I could imagine Sydney working for one of the town’s larger inns and figuring her way through some of the odd requests and difficult personalities that sometimes come our way.
She met her boyfriend, Ali, in the first book in the series, Death of a Bear, and throughout the subsequent eight novels they worked out precisely what relationship they could have that balanced her work, his work (he’s part of Homeland Security’s human-trafficking division), her mother (not a small consideration), his sister (a police commissioner), their friends, and the quirks and drama of Provincetown… so that finally now, in the 10th volume, The Honeymoon Homicides, they finally have tied the knot themselves. Sydney and Ali are married!
Of course, it being Sydney, not everything goes to plan, and there’s a murder between the ceremony and the reception. On the premises. In fact, the victim is the most literal of wedding crashers, as he falls through an awning onto the patio where they just said, “I do.”
It’s a terrible event, of course, especially for the victim, but you’ll have noticed how I said, “it being Sydney”? There’s that balance again, between the dark of this death and the amusement inherent in assuming that if there’s a murder anywhere in town, Sydney is going to be in the thick of it… the word-equivalent, perhaps, of an eyeroll. That balance is one of the strengths of this book and of this series, I think, and perhaps of cozy mysteries in general.
We’ve all probably read police procedurals that leave us exhausted, depleted, sad, feeling that the darkness has truly won, that the world is a bleak place. Certainly, it’s easy to feel that way if we keep our attention too much on the news. But cozy mysteries offer some respite from that darkness: they give us lovable, quirky characters in unlikely situations who bring humanity, humor, and humility to life’s most difficult moments, and allow us, at the end of the day, to see that the good can outweigh the bad in the world.
And that feels pretty cozy, doesn’t it?