On the third Wednesday of each month, I’ll feature a cozy mystery I read long ago. Backlist titles make my heart sing, and hopefully you’ll find some new to you reads for your cozy TBR. This month we’re going back to the year 2013. 

The Darling Dahlias and the Cucumber Tree

(The Darling Dahlias Book One) by Susan Wittig Albert
July 6, 2010 by Berkley
304 pages

About the Book:

The good old ladies of Darling, Alabama, are determined to keep their town beautiful. The Darling Dahlias garden club is off to a good start until rumors of trouble at a bank, an escaped convict, and a ghost digging around their tree surface. If anyone can get to the root of these mysteries, it’s the Darling Dahlias.

Series Link – Miss Elizabeth Lacy and the Darling Dahlias, a garden club, in fictional 1930s Darling, Alabama

My Thoughts:

This is one of those series that I think about a lot and wish it never ended. Ten books in all and they are each so well done. The mystery is solid and the cozy details, especially of life in the 1930s in a small town are fascinating. If you like cozy historical mysteries with excellent characters, descriptive settings and strong whodunit elements, this is for you. Honestly, I’m a fan of all of the books Alberts writes. You simply can’t go wrong. 

About the Author:

Author Website 

Even a little girl with big dreams could never have imagined that her books would sell over six million copies.

An Illinois native, Susan grew up on a small farm near Danville, where she loved walking through the fields, bicycling and–of course–reading. She read the Little House books so often that she practically memorized them, and was a devoted fan of Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. So it’s no great surprise that she began her writing career when she was still in her teens, selling short stories for young readers to magazines like Calling All Girls, Jack and Jill, and American Girl. 

But that writing career had to wait almost three decades. Marriage, kids (two boys and a girl), college and graduate school, and appointments as an English professor and university administrator intervened. It wasn’t until midlife that Susan decided that it was high time to do what she loved most. She left the university, returned to writing, and never looked back. A prolific writer who is always exploring and experimenting with form and style, she is the author or co-author of over 130 mysteries, historical and biographical fiction, memoir, and nonfiction.

A longtime member of the Texas Institute of Letters, Women Writing the West, and Sisters in Crime, Susan believes passionately in the power and importance of women’s stories. In 1997, she founded the Story Circle Network, an international membership organization that supports women writers. She has been honored by membership in the Texas Institute of Letters and the Texas Literary Hall of Fame. Always interested in the business side of the publishing world, in 2013 she began publishing under her own imprint, Persevero Press.  More recently, she moved her newsletter (All About Thyme) and her blogs (LifeScapes, BookScapes) to Thyme, Place & Story, on Substack.