Witty Little Knitter

I am somewhat conflicted about this book. I really enjoyed the characters. Betts, the main-characters was lovely and I also really liked that she was not infallable and always right about everything and everybody (she really disliked Ophelia and behaved incredibly childish towards her but unlike so many other cozies I did not have the impression that the reader was supposed to agree with her actions and see them as anything but childish and at the end there was no big 'I had been right about her all along'-reveal). The othe inhabitants of Broken Rope (best town name ever) were also really likeable but the bus-tourists stayed all a bit flat.

I also had some issues with the mystery or rather mysteries. There's the modern one about the murdered tourist and the historic one about the question if Sally really killed her parents and in both I found Betts a bit too passive. She did almost no real investigation in the modern one but rather stumbled into it while looking into Sally's case.
That is actually an interesting variation to the 'amateur sleuth thinks she's better than the police'-type of books but I found it involved a bit too many lucky coincidences and Betts seemed also a bit too reluctant to investigate Sally's case and sometimes it felt like she had almost be forced at gunpoint to help Sally:
Sally thought that a clue to her case could be in her diary and thinks Betts should search for it. Sally's first idea is that her diary might have been burried with her and it is quite understandable that Betts is reluctant to dig up 100 year old corpses but then Sally gets off that idea and consideres other possibilities where the diary might be that would be much easier to investigate but Betts always finds reasons why she defenitely cannot look there and everytime Sally brings it up she basically screams them at the reader.
I ended up feeling a bit annoyed by that. Not that her reasons were completely riddiculous but it felt a bit like everytime Sally mentioned her diary Betts stopped her ears and yelled 'LALA NOT LISTENING' instead of thinking of possible ways to get around her problems.

Still not completely averse to trying out other books in this series. I enjoyed the mixture of cozy crime and paranormal fantasy and the times Betts wasn't being stupid she was really likeable. (Plus: the reciepes in the back sound yummie)