a cute little cozy, first of a few in the series... the plotting of the mystery itself was a fraction clumsy, but not too off-putting ( )

I randomly found this cozy series on Audible and decided to give it a try. I am not sure how I found it, other than I probably went into an audiobook rabbit hole (easy to do on that site!) and ended up here. Anyway, aside from this being a new series to me, this author is also new to me.

Poppy has a deadend job, a horrid boss, and bills she can barely afford to pay. She feels trapped and longs for more, but can't see a way out of her situation. There are little bright spots, such as her (overbearing-but-well-meaning) landlady (Nell) and the prophetic encounter she has with a woman selling handmade flower pins for charity, who ends up gifting one in the shape of a heather flower to Poppy as a thank-you for her assistance and stating:

"Heather symbolizes transformative change—from the mundane to the extraordinary."

One day Poppy's fate changes when gets she a surprise letter from a lawyer stating that she has inherited a cottage and gardening center business from her grandmother, whom she had never had contact with.

At first, Poppy thinks she wants to sell the property, because the condition her grandmother left on the inheritance is that, for Poppy to inherit, she has to agree to continue the business.
Unfortunately, Poppy is not the best gardener, despite her grandmother and mother being very adept at it. Poppy decides to not even go to visit the cottage, since she planned to sell it, anyway.

A week or so later, Poppy has had enough at work, gives her boss a satisfying what-for, and walks out. Soon after, Nell tells her that the man who owns the duplex they share is no longer okay with Nell subletting to Poppy, stating it's a violation of Nell's lease with him (Nell did not follow-through with getting proper paperwork about it when the man originally said it was okay, so there was nothing she could do about it).

With no other choice, Poppy decides to stay temporarily in her grandmother's cottage for a few weeks until she finds another option. Her first afternoon and evening there are pretty eventful as she:
• Witnesses someone trying to break in to the cottage
• Receives an awkward call from the lawyer managing her grandmother's estate
• Breaks up a fight between a cat and dog
• Follows the cat as it seems to purposefully leads her to an area of the garden
• Imagines she felt something resembling skin in the garden as she was getting up from a fall
• Returns the cat to her grumpy neighbor

The next morning, Poppy wakes up very early, still ill-at-ease over touching what she thought had been clammy skin in the garden the night before. She decides to head back to the garden and retrace her steps now that the sun is coming up to see for sure. As it turns out, it really was a dead body she touched the night before (not that we are surprised to learn this!).

Not wanting to spoil anything, I'll just say that from this point, Poppy goes on to meet a lot of people, overhear gossip, make connections, involve herself in the mystery, and learn more about gardening as a tangential result. I was pleased to see that in the end, though I waffled back and forth between a few people, my first instinct on who was the murderer was right!

This cozy mystery is a little unusual in that the body is not found until well into the story—more like 1/4 of the way in, rather than 4 pages in. That didn't bother me, as the backstory was engaging and I kind of liked the longer build up to the body reveal. I think it even helped me feel a little closer to Poppy because I "knew" her more before she got into her role of amateur detective.

So far I like Poppy (she was teetering a liiiittle bit into woe-is-me territory, but has escaped it so far), which is always a plus because if you don't like the protagonist in a story it's really hard to want to read about them. The other supporting characters are also very well done with distinctive personalities, but they aren't so on-the-nose that they tread into the caricature category.

This author is really, really good at making painfully nosy and patronizing characters, haha. I see a lot of potential for growth in the characters and the story, and of course I love that there is a cat involved. =^_^= The atmosphere is well done, the writing is well done, and I really have no major complaints except for a couple bits that seemed inconsistent to me (I am not noting them here yet, as I may have just not been paying attention—I'm sure I'll listen to this again, so I'll see if at that time I have the same open questions).

The plot was good and, despite how much I adore some other cozy mystery series (like the Family Skeleton Mystery series series and the Book Retreat Mystery series), for whatever reason I really had a particularly good time trying to figure this one out. I couldn't wait to see if any of the connections I'd made in my mind were the solution, or if I had just been clouded by a lot of red herrings!

And, there are some funny bits. My favorites were:

"A T-Rex with a sore head would have seemed friendly compared to him last night."

I almost laughed out loud at that, I think because the line is cute and conjures a funny image, but also the narrator did it in such a deadpan voice that it was perfect and hit my funny bone just right.

"Terrible scandal, it was, when she ran off to join those other girls—you know, the kind that follow musicians around... what are they called? Guppies?"

I said earlier that this author is very good at writing gossipy characters, and it made it all the more fun when she worked in bits like that when the elderly women were talking.

The narrator's voice did take me a little bit to get used to, but I grew to like it and see that she is an excellent narrator and voice actress. I really did not want to stop listening!

I did like this a book, so I plan to continue reading it. I am interested in the characters and what happens to them and how they grow. ( )