Six Sweets Under is the first book in a new shopfront cozy by Sarah Fox. Released 7th Feb 2023 by Penguin Random House on their Berkley imprint, it's 304 pages and is available in mass market paperback, audio, and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links and references throughout. I've really become enamored of ebooks with interactive formats lately.
This is an engaging and fun series starter with former-actress-returned-to-her-smalltown-roots Becca Ransom, who is helping her grandparents as a chocolatier in their shop, True Confections. When a local curmudgeon is found dead after a very public disagreement with Becca's grandfather, she is drawn into getting to the bottom of the scandal to clear her family name.
The book is full of the light puns and humorous dialogue readers expect from small town cozies. It's populated by eccentric characters alongside more realistic and relatable secondary characters. The author does a superlative job with the setting, which plays an integral part in the mystery.
The mystery is self contained in this volume and it works well as an introduction and standalone. There are some unexplained foreshadowed developments in the very last pages which strongly hint at the next volume, but they don't detract from the denouement and resolution of this story.
Four stars. Definitely one for fans of small-town shopfront light cozies.
Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.
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