Today’s Daily Happy is the Burning Cove series by Amanda Quick. Do you like romance novels? Do you like mysteries? Do you like 1930s Hollywood? Do like incredibly improbably but oddly delightful things? Then you’re going to want to check these out.
All the books are set in the 1930s in Burning Cove, California, a fictional city that is a sort of vacation/spa town popular with the Hollywood set. All of them follow a similar pattern: heroine has to flee her previous life due to danger befalling her and start over in Burning Cove. She meets a man who has “mob connections” but also an otherwise sensible job and they have to team up to solve a mystery that definitely involves danger from the woman’s previous life, the mob somehow, and a government conspiracy. All of them are marketed differently and all of them include these elements. Maybe if you read one a year, like they come out, rather than one right after the other it’s not as obvious but y’all, it’s a blueprint. Luckily, it’s an incredibly silly but fun blueprint that made me fly through these books in a few days.
Let me just take some key sentences out of plot summaries for you to enjoy:
Once a world-famous magician whose career was mysteriously cut short, Oliver Ward is now the owner of the Burning Cove Hotel.
After escaping from a private sanitarium, Adelaide Blake arrives in Burning Cove, California, desperate to start over.
Into this make-believe world comes psychic to the stars Madame Zolanda. Adelaide and Jake know better than to fall for her kind of con. But when the medium becomes a victim of her own dire prediction and is killed, they’ll be drawn into a murky world of duplicity and misdirection.
Former trapeze artist Amalie Vaughn moved to Burning Cove to reinvent herself, but things are not going well. After spending her entire inheritance on a mansion with the intention of turning it into a bed-and-breakfast, she learns too late that the villa is said to be cursed. When the first guest, Dr. Norman Pickwell, is murdered by his robot invention during a sold-out demonstration, rumors circulate that the curse is real.
Matthias is on the trail of a groundbreaking prototype cipher machine.
I can’t with these books and that’s why I love them. Book four comes out in May and I am ready. Give me that good, good nonsense.