Bottom Feeders

If you know the cozy mystery genre, you know what you are getting here — and Jan Bono delivers it well. Sylvia Avery is a freshly retired woman on Washington State's Long Beach Peninsula who gets drawn into suspicious goings-on at the Clamshell Motel, with her sharp-tongued casino-worker friend Mercedes along for the ride. The Pacific Northwest coastal setting is charming and specific, the recurring characters are warm and funny, and the series ran to six complete books because readers kept coming back for more. By design there is no graphic violence, no bad language, and no explicit content — the genre's defining promise, and Bono keeps it. The tradeoff is that cozy mysteries are deliberately light, and readers wanting harder crime fiction will find this too gentle. For the audience it is written for, though, it is a clean, enjoyable start to a series.