I have a major soft-spot for cozy mysteries and am always on the lookout for one featuring a lesbian protagonist. So imagine my joy when I discovered The Shay O’Hanlon Capers by Jessie Chandler. Even better than a finding a single cozy mystery with a lesbian protagonist, I had managed to stumble across a whole series.
Bingo Barge Murder is the first in the series and introduces Shay O’Hanlon and her wacky gang. Shay runs and co-owns a coffee shop in Minneapolis with her best friend, and fellow lesbian, Kate. Shay’s quiet existence is thrown into chaos when her best friend Coop shows up at the coffee shop begging for Shay’s help after his boss is murdered and Coop is a suspect. Things only get more complicated when JT, Minneapolis detective and heartthrob, enters the shop on her way to work. Shay is forced to find the real murderer to save Coop all while balancing her growing romance with JT. Shay welcomes the help of Eddy, Shay’s mother figure, and her gang of gambling grannies. The stakes are high, and I ended up plowing through the book in one sitting.
I fell in love with Shay, Eddy, Coop, and JT throughout the story and rooted for Shay and JT’s romance the whole way through. Within the rules of the genre, there is no explicit or gory violence and, in later books, no explicit sex. This is part of why I love cozies: you get the tension and thrill of mysteries without the gore of crime fiction.
However, Bingo Barge Murder was clearly a debut novel, and the inexperience showed in the writing. Pacing was rushed during the novel, and it came in rather short at under 200 pages. There is also a character to whom I have mixed feelings. Rocky has an unnamed intellectual disability at at times through the books is used as a sort of comic relief character–the characters of the book think on him fondly, and his character arc does go through some development, but his character is somewhat of a caricature. I feel like Chandler is trying to be inclusive when writing Rocky, but it can sometimes come across as disrespectful and ableist.
Following Bingo Barge Murder, the issues with pacing and novel length improve. While Chandler might not be the most impressive writer I have ever come across, her novels are well within the standard quality of cozy mysteries.
All in all, I would recommend The Shay O’Hanlon Capers if you are looking for a light mystery with lovable characters and, of course, lesbians.
