I’m a fan of cozy mysteries. Miss Marple, Brother Cadfael, Mma Ramotswe, Alan Grant, and Flavia de Luce are guaranteed to bring pleasure. Especially if they are read with a steaming pot of tea while sitting on a leather couch with a fire snapping close by.

In Winter Watch, Anita Klumpers has written what I call a cozy-eccentric book. Barley, Wisconsin, is a isolated northern burg where the Justice of the Peace is also the dog catcher and where a few crazies reside. Bernice, a miscreant referred to as the resident killer, is the battiest of them all. After a family member dies, Bernice gets meals and kindness and concerns. And wouldn’t you know, she likes the perks of grief. More relatives mysteriously die. Sympathy can be mighty addicting.

Like Alexander McCall Smith, Klumper weaves humor into the warp and woof of her prose. Blizzards are snowstorms with enthusiasm. A woman was proud to give her son a Biblical name—Tubal—until the nurse told her it sounded like a female medical procedure.

There is comfort—I like a woman who knows her way around an egg—and a passage about joy that is flat out lyrical.

Joy arrived unbidden and unpredicted to pour from heart to fingertips to toes. She held her breath, everytime, to preserve and examine it but it forever danced just out of her grasp and slipped away. Claudia stayed still, focusing, her heart ready to burst. At the last crucial second joy seeped through cracks and crevices of her being until her every extremity and pore rejoiced before the evaporation worked backwards and she sat in the afterglow.

The focal point of the narrative centers on an old watch. The prologue and epilogue added more layers of history regarding the watch. The story line had me eagerly turning the page, and a bit annoyed with life’s beckoning demands when I needed to put the book down.

In short, this is a satisfying and entertaining read.