Meet Amanda Pepper, a thirty year old school teacher who just broke up with yet another boyfriend...much to her mother's chagrin. When Amanda is not trying to quit boyfriends or smoking she is stumbling into deadly crime scenes. Only Liza Nichols is no stranger to Amanda. She was a coworker of Amanda's and engaged to wealthy, influential senator-hopeful, Hayden Cole. She was also found murdered on Ms. Pepper's living room floor. And that's how the trouble started.
When it comes to the antics of Amanda Pepper, you have to let reality go. There are things she does and says that I cannot imagine a sane person doing or saying. The misconception that she and Liza were very close, for example. Mrs. Nichols, Liza's own mother, was convinced Liza and Amanda were the best of best friends. Future mother-in-law, Mrs. Cole, thought they had been friends since childhood and knew each other as intimately as sisters. Why doesn't Amanda think that these misconceptions are super weird and why isn't she telling the police about them? As an aside, my doctor assumed I took an antibiotic before surgery and when I didn't correct her (because I hadn't), it bugged me for days.
When a second murder victim is found, again with ties to Amanda, she is assigned police protection in the form of a hunky date-material detective. Her sister and mother salivate at the thought of them as a couple.
Confessional: when they solve the crimes I wish Pepper had put two and two together sooner. Her knowledge of Shakespeare's Macbeth would have cracked the case wide open if she had just done her homework. ( )

Pure fun fluff. Just keep reading the series. ( )

Second Read February 14-15, 2016.
First Read June 20-21, 2015. Book Review from First Read.

What fun to discover a novel with the setting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania! AND it's the first title of a mystery series!! AND the main character, Amanda Pepper is an English teacher turned sleuth!!! Then what a delight to learn that the author was a former English teacher in Philly!!! It makes one wonder if she did any sleuthing for the Philadelphia Police Department(PPD) ;)

LOVED IT!

Two of my favorites in the descriptive category are:
(1) "During the great Coca-Cola switch-over, I tried to tell Beth (Amanda's older & married sister) to think of herself as the Classic form, to realize that she, like Coke, didn't have to reinvent herself. But she didn't see the connection."
(2) "I'd be cushioned by my lovely relatives, and I'd die of suffocation and boredom, instead."

And the author absolutely nailed the description of weather as shared by this example:
"I've never understood why they call this the temperate zone. It is anything but. With weather ranging from below zero to one hundred degrees, it should be called the schizoid belt.
But every so often, with totally intemperate zest, a day blooms with a nearly painful beauty. It's a day for believing your lover's promises, for rediscovering humanity and feeling kinship with it, for deciding not to join the Sun Belt defectors just yet.
Saturday was one of those. I looked out the guest room window at a sincerely blue sky dotted with cartoon fluffs of clouds. Such a spring day promises a mind-boggling, glorious summer, I'd lived long enough to know that this promise is a bald-faced lie. Still, days like this are so sweet prior knowledge becomes questionable. This is a brand new beginning, and anything's possible."

I enjoyed every aspect of the mystery and can't wait to read more titles in the series! ( )

A confluence of events lead me to pick up this much treasured first in an older, but excellent, series. I've been bored senseless at work so I've been working on creating a perfect database of my books over on libib.com and seeing the Amanda Pepper titles made me realise it's been an age since I've read any of them. We've been hit with a heat wave this week that's peaked today with a 43C/110F high, and finally, the A/C at the office cried "Uncle!" and quite first thing this morning, so once the indoor temps hit 34C, I went home - 11:15am. So I had a delightful afternoon at home with nothing to do but think cool thoughts and pray to the A/C gods that mine was made of sterner stuff and kept the house cool. Oh, and read! I could have grabbed one from my every growing TBR pile, but Amanda Pepper was on my mind, so I picked up the first in the series, and possibly my favorite, Caught Dead in Philadelphia.

This whole series, with the benefit of hindsight, seems to be one straddling the space between "traditional" cozies and the cozies we have today that seem, almost without exception, to be following the formulae de jour; namely, everything must have a theme or be centered around a hobby, and just about all of them have to bleed just a little bit into chick-lit. I'm not complaining, as I read a staggering number of them, but I admit most cozies today lack a certain weightiness, or, dare I say, maturity, that many of the older cozies took for granted was a part of what made a good story.

Caught Dead in Philadelphia (and the series as a whole) has more weight to it, more gravitas, but it has the lovely, lively banter, sarcasm - snark - that I love so much about modern cozies too. Amanda Pepper is a teacher at a private, posh preparatory school - not because she has noble views of educating the future, or because she feels it's her calling, but because there's not much else she can do with her liberal arts degree. She's not perky, upbeat, or optimistic. She's just a normal early 30's woman with a job, trying to avoid her mother's constant "why aren't you married yet??" harping. Until she comes home one day to find her co-worker, Liza, dead on her fireplace hearth. Liza, who was engaged to an old-money politician preparing a run for office. Detective C.K. Mackenzie finds it odd that Liza was at her house alone and Amanda was the last person to see her alive, and everybody but everybody wants to know what Liza told her before she was killed.

The plot necessarily throws Amanda and C.K. (who won't reveal what the C or the K stands for - setting up a running gag that spans over quite a few of the books) together for most of the book, and it's when these two are together that the dialogue really shines. Witty, sarcastic, sometimes sincere enough to put a little hitch in your pulse rate. I love these two together, they're probably one of my favorite "cozy couples" over the years. Ms. Roberts writes a realistic relationship that is never boring, even when it is.

The murder plot is a fine one. Since it's a re-read it's hard for me to claim "there are no holes in this plot!" and really be sure I'm right, but I'll stand by my assertion that it's finely crafted with more than a few suspects with very real motives and an ending that is rather unexpected. I think. I'll just add here in a not-so-natural segue, that the book dates beautifully - nothing felt out of date, out of style or 'old fashioned', and other than a lack of computers/mobile phones, this story could have taken place in the present day as well as in the 80's.

This is a cozy of the old school, although not the oldest. It's not stuffy but it's not cotton candy either. I'd highly recommend this to anyone who likes a good murder mystery without either the noir or the frothy whipped cream. ( )

Amanda Pepper annoyed me by withholding information from the police for the first four chapters of the book. I like her boyfriend but what does he see in her? ( )