In 2003, television comedy writer Laura Levine created a female sleuth in the person of freelance copywriter Jaine Austen. Jaine soon became a member in good standing of a select club of wisecracking female detectives, including famed fictional P.I.s Stephanie Plum and Kinsey Milhone, all of the quick comeback school of detecting.

After penning her first book, This Pen for Hire, Levine went on to please mystery fans with her clever plots and wry humor. Now she has penned her 10^th installment in the series, aptly titled Pampered to Death, wherein Jaine heads off for a week of spa relaxation at The Haven, a dubiously named retreat that turns out to be a “fat farm,” or weight loss center, where weigh-ins are public torture and dessert consists of a wilted slice of mango.

The Haven becomes a perfect setting for Jaine’s hilarious brand of detecting, her one-liners as abundant as the book’s off-beat characters—including the sleuth’s cat, Prozac, a feline who’s dying for a bacon bit amidst all the lean cuisine. Equally comic are Jaine’s asides, when she shares what she imagines her compatriots are saying. In Jaine’s mind, the spa owner calls her “a tub of lard” when she’s really only calling out Jaine’s weight at the daily weigh-in, a number Jaine describes as a “carefully guarded national secret.”

The early pages are devoted to a spa-full of suspects—seems everyone at The Haven has a motive for wanting spa guest and B-list movie actress Mallory Francis out of the running . . . for good. The A-list of possibles includes Mallory’s disgruntled personal assistants; the pill-popping spa owner; former co-star Clint; and a jealous athletic instructor whose husband is dallying with the bodacious film star.

After the body is discovered—strangled with spa-healthy kelp—Jaine’s detecting begins in earnest. Her desire to escape the premises at the earliest possible moment is thwarted by the police, who want no one to leave town ‘til the murderer is apprehended. That’s plenty of incentive for Jaine to employ her detecting skills, even after she nearly becomes a victim herself, held under water by unknown hands in the spa’s Jacuzzi.

Unfortunately, there are distracting and un-funny e-mails scattered throughout the book. Minus those, this humorous send-up of health spas is sure to score high in reader caloric count—a tasty treat for Jaine Austen fans everywhere.

Leslie Meier has penned more than 14 Lucy Stone mystery novels, and her latest, English Tea Murder, has arrived just in time for her many fans to stash it in their summer beach bags and take it to the seaside. This book has a perfect title, invoking the surprise and thrill of murder as well as a British atmosphere of tea shops, country hedgerows, shadowy cathedral carvings and crypts and cozy row homes with tiny gardens.

Leave it to Lucy to be sitting across the aisle from a dead guy on an airliner en route to London. College teacher George Templeton expires in front of her eyes, after his asthma inhaler falls into a glass of water as he gasps for air. Lucy and three friends are on a group tour to London, and the deceased is (or was) the tour leader. The group includes a mix of students, parents and a few townies like Lucy and her friends, one of whom teaches a class in the college’s night school. Templeton’s death arouses odd and violent emotions in the group, but what’s their rhyme or reason? It begins to seem as though many people had a reason to cheer his death—including the tour guide sent to take Templeton’s place.  

Lucy, in her listening way, hears various stories from her tour-mates, and a rather skewed, crooked pattern (involving a near-death plunge off a pier in Brighton and, much later, another murder) begins to take shape. How do these incidents connect, and is there something—or someone—at the center, turning this wheel of misfortune?

There’s plenty here to please Meier’s followers and fans of cozy mysteries: Lucy and her friends shop their way about the countryside, and Meier pays homage to all the tried and true British high points, from the Tower of London and its resident ravens to tea shops, strawberry jam and Devonshire cream, to the glories of Stonehenge at sunset. Though it’s hard to believe that Lucy could be quite as naïve as she sometimes seems (after delving into, what, 14-plus crimes?), she does knit up the ravell’d sleeve of another one—but not without leaving readers guessing as to what the future has in store for her characters.