Books like Death in a Budapest Butterfly — picked by fans

This cozy series breaks the mold of the female amateur sleuth with Charlie Harris, the male university librarian. The rest of my expectations are intact, although the cat character Diesel behaves more cat-like than many felines in cozy mysteries.

This series is set in the South, in usually sleepy Athena, Georgia–sleepy until a murder stirs things up. I feel right at home in Charlie’s home/boarding house and getting to know his southern-flavored coworkers, friends, and family. 

I love my local library and its bookmobile. This cozy mystery series has both. Even better, it has a clever cat. I enjoy getting a behind-the-scenes look at library operations.

Eddie, the cat, begins as a stowaway on the Michigan bookmobile and quickly becomes a huge attraction for library patrons. Minnie Hamilton and Eddie are in a unique position to discover bodies on their rural bookmobile route. There is a long romance arc in the series that slowly builds to a sweet conclusion. In a unique living situation, Minnie lives on a houseboat during the summer and in her aunt’s B&B during the winter.

I like how Eddie is involved with uncovering the mysteries in a perfectly logical way, considering he is a cat.

While the setting and characters are standard for cozy mysteries, some elements make this a favorite series of mine. The setting is pretty typical–the second-hand up-cycling shop in a small New England town is run by a single woman. Elvis the cat helps solve the mysteries in a perfectly logical and cat-like manner.

Where this series differs is the tension of the long romance arc that lands exactly where I thought it should–after being afraid Sarah would go for the wrong Mr. Right. Additionally, in some cozies, the team-of-little-old-ladies trope is bland.

Ryan’s characters are distinct, with varied personalities and life experiences. While meeting the expectations of the cozy reader, the formula has been refreshingly improved, lifting this author above others in the genre.

Serendipity. In 2023, I visited a cat café in Tokyo, Japan. Then, I found this series by Cate Conte, which is based on a cat café in New England, USA. It has all the classic elements of cozy mysteries I love–a mystery to be solved, a body without too much violence and no gore, a light romance, a small-town setting, a close, if slightly problematic, family, and, of course, cats! Lots and lots of cats.

When I pick up a book in this series, I know I’ll be transported away to Daybreak Island. While Maddie James tangles with solving a mystery and finding her way through her tangled personal life, each book will end with a solution. I can escape my own problems for a few hours.

I had never been to The Cloisters here in Manhattan after many decades of living here, but I read Katy Hays's book, and had to visit it afterward. Hays’ book was a great pre-cursor to the trip to the Museum of Medieval and Early Renaissance Art.

I kept in mind the world of the fictional underdog, Anne Sitwell, who worked her way up to know there were secrets in the vault at the Cloisters. A Tarot Deck, possibly from the d’Este family in Italy, sets the stage for skullduggery while secrets and murders mount, leading to a plot twist at the end for our hapless Anne. It was interesting talking to the docent at the museum after I took a garden tour, and to spot a copy of this book for sale in the gift shop there.

This is a marvellous little book that delves into Spare’s engagement with fortune-telling by cards, particularly the story of his 1930s ‘Surrealist Racing Forecast Cards,’ which he sold through a small ad in the Exchange and Mart magazine.

They are quintessentially Spare, perhaps more than the recently discovered Spare tarot (juvenilia, in comparison, from before he went beyond conventional occultism). Along with previously unseen photos and Spare’s own essay "Mind to Mind and How" (“By a Sorcerer”), the heart of the book is Gavin’s "A Few Leaves from the Devil’s Picture Book." 

This was a milestone in Spare research, back when what little was known about him was unreliable, and it is also a beautiful piece of writing–I borrowed a line from it to close my own book on him. 

This book is the best I've come across that explores the overlap between games and fortune-telling with detailed examples from cultures around the world.

The suggestion in the book's title that board games originated from attempts to divine the future is perhaps questionable, but there is no doubt that the two have been entwined from the earliest times, which is not surprising because all games try to some extent to create a microcosm of some of life's aspects and people have never been able to resist trying to nudge things in a favorable direction. Or at least get a heads up on what lies around the corner.

Ludomancy, it's called–a lovely word. Personally, I find that playing some form of Patience is a great way of ordering the mind before tackling any piece of work or, in fact, any tricky life decision. The flickering images conjured by the cards help… show more.

Jessa Crispin’s Creative Tarot suggests ways to connect to one’s muse through tarot. Crispin’s chapters match each tarot card’s essence to artists, thinkers, philosophers, and writers, looking at challenges and gifts each personality encountered over the course of their lifetime (and how they manifested in detriment or bloom). One of my favorite lines makes tarot card exploration forever relevant: Crispin writes, “It is about retelling the present.” And it is about how to ground tarot energy in specifics: what does it mean to be a King of Cups? Who has lived such an incarnation? Her “living examples” make tarot tangible for my students; I love her specific suggestions for how to explore the energy of each tarot card through music, film, paintings, art, and literature. 

I loved the echoes of culture I experienced with this novel, which has a Chinese American protagonist. The cultural expectations and even tidbits of language made me feel represented.

I also admired that Vanessa could tell fortunes through examining the dregs of a teacup; as a tea lover, I wholeheartedly endorsed the notion. I was already familiar with Lim’s storytelling and knew I’d be in for a treat of a read, especially one filled with vivid details of Paris and its excellent culinary ambiance.

Over the years, when I taught tarot classes, there were always a few students who were interested in the divination aspect of tarot, but tarot was just not the right oracle for them. For animal lovers, I recommended the simpler and more direct Medicine Cards: The Discovery of Power Through the Ways of Animals by Jamie Sam's and David Carson because animal totems resonated with them. 

I recall a student who was of Norwegian ancestry who found tarot overwhelming, but the right oracle for him was The Book of Runes by Ralph H. Bloom. Even if tarot is your path, it's interesting to know of the many forms of divination that can be available to everyone.