Title: Easter Egg MurderAuthor: Leslie Meier; Lee Hollis; Peggy EhrhartSeries: Lucy Stone Mystery #31.6;
Hayley Powell Food and Cocktails Mysteries; Knit & Nibble Mysteries
Genre: Cozy Mystery Anthology
Publisher: Kensington Books
Format: Kindle ARC
No. of pages: 368
Published: February 24, 2026
My Rating: 4 Stars
DESCRIPTION:
Light pink, robin’s egg blue, daffodil yellow, mint green—Easter eggs hiding sweet treats come in every pastel color. But in a few small towns this year, cracking them could be more fatal than fun…
EASTER EGG MURDER by LESLIE MEIER
In Provence to visit her daughter, part-time reporter Lucy Stone is soaking up the atmosphere, even if it includes one Carole Capobianco, the empty-nester she encountered on the flight over. Not exactly two peas in a pod, they’re both amused by the tale of a neighbor’s chickens refusing to lay eggs. The decoy eggs he’s set out to encourage the egg-centric hens are not only gorgeously Faberge-style, they’re being stolen! That’s confusing enough, but what’s happened to the cook is deadly serious.
DEATH BY ANOTHER EASTER EGG by LEE HOLLIS
When an ambitious young reporter dies mid-meal at Hayley Powell’s Bar Harbor restaurant, Hayley is horrified. Determined to save her eatery’s reputation, Hayley scrambles to crack the case wide open like an egg, discovering that the victim was about to break a juicy story—one that a number of people (er, suspects) did not order off the menu. Which makes finding the killer more than devilishly hard . . .
AN EGGY WAY TO DIE by PEGGY EHRHART
Cleaning up after the Easter egg hunt in the Arborville park, friends Pamela and Bettina are startled to find something else hidden—the dead body of a local cookbook author, surrounded by broken shells and slippery yolks. The pair are far from hard-boiled detectives, but as they search for clues, they find that the whole case smells distinctly like rotten eggs . . .
EASTER EGG MURDER by LESLIE MEIER
As a long-time reader and lover of the Lucy Stone series, I loved this quick novella. In this quick read, Lucy and her husband Bill travel to Paris to visit their daughter Elizabeth. As has always been the case with Lucy, there is a crime involved while she is in Paris and she shows off her skills when it comes to unearthing killers.
DEATH BY ANOTHER EASTER EGG by LEE HOLLIS
In this novella, I was introduced to Hayley Powell. When a murder occurs in her restaurant, she excels when it comes to solving the murder. This story is extra sweet as recipes are included.
AN EGGY WAY TO DIE by PEGGY EHRHART
Another Easter story in this anthology introduces Pamela and Bettina to me, and they are instrumental when it comes to solving a murder.
While Ehrhart and Hollis are newcomers to me, the stories were captivating enough to compel me to want to visit and read each series. Regarding Meier’s story, as a Lucy Stone enthusiast, I’m eager to explore her works whenever I have the opportunity.
Many thanks to Kensington Books and to NetGalley for this ARC for review. This is my honest opinion.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
I started writing in the late ‘80s when I was attending graduate classes at Bridgewater State College. I wanted to become certified to teach high school English and one of the required courses was Writing and the Teaching of Writing. My professor suggested that one of the papers I wrote for that course was good enough to be published and I sent it off to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine’s Department of First Stories. I got $100 for the story and I’ve been writing ever since. The teaching, however, didn’t work out.
My books draw heavily on my experience as a mother of three and my work as a reporter for various weekly newspapers on Cape . My heroine, Lucy Stone, is a reporter in the fictional town of Tinker’s Cove, Maine, where she lives in an old farmhouse (quite similar to mine on Cape Cod!) with her restoration carpenter husband Bill and four children. As the series has progressed the kids have grown older, roughly paralleling my own family. We seem to have reached a point beyond which Lucy cannot age–my editor seems to want her to remain forty-something forever, though I have to admit I personally am dying to write “Menopause is Murder!”
I usually write one Lucy Stone mystery every year and as you can tell, my editor likes me to feature the holidays in my books. Of course Christmas is one of my favorite times of the year and my newest mystery “Eggnog Murder,” is included in an anthology with two other Christmas novellas by Barbara Ross and Lee Hollis. I’ve long been a fan of the classic English country house mystery, and was a faithful watcher of “Downton Abbey,” so I couldn’t resist trying to write one. I think I succeeded rather well, if I do say so myself, with “British Manor Murder,” which came out in October, 2016.
My books are classified as “cozies” but a good friend insists they are really “comedies of manners” and I do enjoy expressing my view of contemporary American life.
Now that the kids are grown — we have five fabulous grandchildren — my husband and I are enjoying dividing our time between Braintree and Cape Cod, along with our cat, Sylvester.
Find Her: Goodreads / Twitter / Web
Holly Simason is an award winning food and cocktails columnist who worked for the Mount Desert Islander newspaper in Bar Harbor, Maine for ten years. While working at the paper, she won her first award for her column in 2010. It was at that point her brother Rick Copp saw an opportunity. He writes mysteries and she writes recipes. Combine the two for a new book series. They would write under a pen name comprised of their middle names “Lee” and “Hollis”. And the successful Hayley Powell Food & Cocktails Mystery series was born. Holly now resides on the Crystal Coast in North Carolina where she continues to write the popular series with her brother. She is also busy creating and testing new recipes for a future Hayley Powell cookbook. Holly continues to visit her home town of Bar Harbor every summer where the series is set to reconnect with friends and keep her Maine roots intact. Any similarities between her and Hayley Powell are strictly coincidental.Rick Copp is a veteran TV and Film scriptwriter whose many credits include The Golden Girls, Wings, Teen Titans, The Brady Bunch Movie, Scooby Doo, Barbershop among many others. Currently he writes, produces and stars in the hit web series Where the Bears Are. In 2003, he wrote his first comedic murder mystery The Actor’s Guide to Murder, which was followed by two sequels. He also penned a 2007 stand alone novel Fingerprints & Facelifts and a 2010 graphic novel Celebrity Zombie Killers. Once he read his sister’s food and cocktails column, he became an instant fan of her recipes and it was his editor at Kensington Publishing who first suggested a cozy mystery series with recipes featuring an intrepid food columnist with a nose for crime solving. Rick bounces back and forth between LA where he continues to work on TV and film projects and Palm Springs, California where he writes the Hayley Powell Food and Cocktails Mystery series.
Peggy Ehrhart is a former English professor with a Ph.D. in Medieval Literature who now writes mysteries. Her publications include a prize-winning nonfiction book; she has also won awards for her short fiction. Her blues mystery series, featuring blues singer "Maxx" Maxwell, was inspired by her guitar-playing hobby. She currently writes the very cozy Knit & Nibble mystery series for Kensington Books, featuring amateur sleuth Pamela Paterson, founder and mainstay of the Knit and Nibble knitting club in charming Arborville, New Jersey.
