A review by librarianinperiwinkle
A Potion to Die for by Heather Blake

4.0

Carly Bell Hartwell's love potions are never more popular than when Mr. Dunwoody predicts someone will be getting divorced soon. His occasional prognostications are never wrong and inevitably lead to Carly being chased to her potion shop by a mob of panicked spouses worried that their marriages might be less solid than they thought. That all changes the morning Carly and her hex-selling cousin Delia discover a body in Carly's break room--a body clutching one of Carly's potion bottles. The fact that the potion wasn't the cause of death doesn't seem to matter to the spooked crowd, which evaporates as quickly as it gathered. The investigation, led by Carly's delicious ex-fiance, Sergeant Dylan Jackson, doesn't progress fast enough to suit Carly's dwindling bank account, and when her falling down house demands immediate repairs, Carly decides to ferret out the truth of who killed local lawyer Nelson Winston, and why she's being framed for it.

Quirky characters fill the pages of the first book in this fun new cozy contemporary mystery series from the author of the Wishcraft Mysteries. Blake does a good job of bringing the small town of Hitching Post, Alabama, wedding capital of the South, to life.

For readers' advisors: story doorway is primary, character and setting are secondary. I'm marking it "clean reads" because I can't remember any bad language, and there are no sex scenes or on-screen violence.