Why the World Needs a YA Cozy Mystery Series

Image by Milena Mazurek from Pixabay

When I first dreamed up the Sweet Dreams series, I was so excited to have discovered a truly unique idea. YA cozy mysteries! Brilliant! I knew it would be a hard sell doing it the way I wanted, namely, keeping the books short like the young adult mass market paperbacks I grew up with. In an attempt to persuade a potential agent that I’d been in touch with over the years, and who’d shown consistent interest in my work, I typed up this little sales pitch to go along with my query:

Why the World Needs a YA Cozy Mystery Series

Since the Harry Potter series debuted in the late nineties, books for children have mushroomed in size and grown increasingly dark. These are positive developments that have ushered in books both challenging and validating to teens. Additionally, issues like mental health, drugs, sex, violence, suicide, and parental abuse and neglect are incredibly important and should continue to be explored in depth and with unflinching honesty. Yet teens also deserve lighter fare that offers a short and sweet escape… with no romance required. A cozy mystery series featuring teen sleuths would perfectly fill this void.

In keeping with the norms of the cozy mystery genre, my series Sweet Dreams will have no sex, drugs, abuse, profanity, gratuitous violence or gore. What’s more, it will feature no romantic subplots for the main character, no guns, and no dead/neglectful/abusive parents. So where’s the fun? Not to worry—there will be plenty of MURDER. But the victims will not be teens, nor will the perps. Only adults will suffer in Sweet Dreams, but the suffering will be (mostly) off stage, and anyway, the bad guys will always get caught in the end. It’s a world where our teenage hero (along with her adorable dog) always saves the day and justice is always served, and in 45,000 words or less. What’s not to love? 

In the eighties and nineties we had Sweet Valley High and The Baby-Sitters Club—books you could read in a day, books that didn’t make you work too hard, guilty pleasures you read over and over and loved with all your heart despite of (or because of) their over-the-top and formulaic plots. There are plenty of series like these for middle grade readers, but teenagers looking for a quick, sweet escape have a harder time, and usually the shorter stories available to them are centered on romance. A YA cozy mystery series would appeal to the teen demographic and could very well cross over to loyal cozy mystery readers everywhere who are dying for something different.

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Alas, the agent politely declined. Several other agents showed interest in the first Sweet Dreams entry, Murder by Milkshake, requesting partials and fulls, but two main issues became sticking points: one was the low word count (45k; current industry standard is 55k minimum), and two was the fact it was written in third person (YA is usually in first person). I wasn’t willing to budge on either issue, and believing whole-heartedly in what I’d written above, I decided to release the Sweet Dreams series myself. It’s been an absolute delight.

Click here to purchase Murder by Milkshake (Sweet Dreams #1).

Click here to preorder Pralines and Creamed (Sweet Dreams #2).