Top Ten Cozy Mysteries With Reality TV Themes

 

When I set out to write Dog's Kitchen, I had no idea how many other cozy mysteries used reality television shows as a background. It makes sense, though, especially if you've ever seen any of those Housewives shows, which get pretty dangerous!

1. Dog’s Kitchen (Neil S. Plakcy)

When an academic food expert becomes the assistant producer on Dog’s Kitchen, a canine–human cooking competition, she must navigate diva dogfluencers and sabotaged dishes to uncover who's trying to take down the show. https://amzn.to/48EbFwE

2. One Foot in the Grove (Kelly Lane — Olive Grove Mysteries)

When a reality TV cooking show comes to town to film a chef’s olive-oil challenge, a production assistant is murdered and local olive grove owner Eva must solve the case. https://amzn.to/4iPCOBL

3. Murder on the Silver Screen (Margaret Dumas — Movie Palace Mysteries)

A film crew shooting a retro-style reality pilot in a historic movie palace becomes entangled in a murder that the ghostly resident of the theater urges the heroine to solve. https://amzn.to/4oKS04t

4. Shot Through the Hearth (Kate Carlisle — Fixer-Upper Mysteries)

A home-improvement reality show filming at a local eco-fair is thrown into chaos when a sponsor is killed and contractor Shannon Hammer investigates behind the scenes. https://amzn.to/4oPzEzc

5. Lights! Camera! Puzzles! (Parnell Hall — Puzzle Lady Mysteries)

The Puzzle Lady joins the cast of a reality courtroom show, only for a real murder to occur on set, forcing her to puzzle out the truth. https://amzn.to/4rQfTdB

6. Death of a Kitchen Diva (Lee Hollis — Hayley Powell Food & Cocktails Mysteries)

A TV cooking segment meant to launch food columnist Hayley Powell's on-camera career ends in disaster when a rival is poisoned with her recipe. https://amzn.to/4psjTiN

7. Tressed to Kill (Lila Dare — Southern Beauty Shop Mysteries)

A beauty-pageant-style makeover reality show filming in the salon takes a sharp turn when a contestant ends up dead mid-glam. https://amzn.to/3XPuZlK

8. The Diva Runs Out of Thyme (Krista Davis — Domestic Diva Mysteries)

When a televised Thanksgiving cook-off spirals into murder, Sophie Winston must find the real killer before she becomes the next headline. https://amzn.to/4oSZJNZ

9. A Dish to Die For (Lucy Burdette — Key West Food Critic Mysteries)

While serving as a guest judge on a food competition show, food critic Hayley Snow must figure out who killed a contestant with a family recipe worth dying for. https://amzn.to/4p0t1KE

10. A Deadly Inside Scoop (Abby Collette)

A reality-TV-style ice cream competition turns deadly when a celebrity judge is murdered and the heroine must clear her family’s name. https://amzn.to/44J9reD

 

 

Where Creativity Meets the Marketplace

Platform strategy, book bundles, and the evolving indie author toolkit

Neil S. Plakcy

Dec 01, 2025

I hope you all had a moment in the hustle and bustle of the Thanksgiving holiday to express gratitude for those people and things that enrich your lives. I’m particularly grateful for you, dear readers. I have wanted a career as a writer since I was about 15, and I’m so thankful that I can open my laptop each day and create books that readers enjoy.

One focus of this newsletter is to write about the intersection of business and creativity. It seems like every day there are new tools and new ways to sell books. When I was at the Novelists Inc. conference I met the guys from Curios, which has been selling audio for creators for some time. Recently they began selling digital files for writers, with an interesting business model. I pay a subscription fee each month ($5) and I retain 100% of all sales revenue.

Amazon, on the other hand, pays me 70%. I’m experimenting with three special bundles, only available at Curios. I want to see if I can convince my readers to try his platform with me.

$15 for all 14 Mahu

$10 for all 14 bodyguards

$5 4-book erotica collection

And if I can’t sell at least one audiobook or one e-book bundle, then I’ve only lost $5 and a few hours of my time. I was heartened to learn in his recent newsletter that author and thought leader Johnny B. Truant has moved his whole catalogue to Curios.

Readers still have two weeks to grab my special Dog’s Kitchen bundle, with autograph, extra pictures, and bonus short story.

Special Bundle

You can also pre-order the e-book print edition at Amazon or your favorite online retailer. Because the book is available through Ingram, which distributes to bookstores, you can order from any of them as well.

Dog's Kitchen Amazon

Other retailers

With the upcoming release of Dog’s Kitchen, I’ve moved Dog of Deliverance into Kindle Unlimited, which means I’ve had to remove it from all other online stores. Dog’s Kitchen will probably follow the same pattern – wide sales for the first few months, then into KU to capture page read income (KU page read money is about 1/3 of my income, but I hate to inconvenience or lose readers who don’t worship the big Zon.)

Dog of Deliverance Amazon

I also moved a bunch of my MM romances into KU. You can now find Five Fun Gay Romances: GayLife.com, Mi Amor, In His Kiss, The Russian Boy, and The Catbird Seat in one volume. The individual books are also available in KU if you missed one of them.

Five Fun Gay Romances Amazon

I had lunch with a childhood friend in town for the holidays recently, and saw Wicked For Good with a snowbird friend. Lately I’ve been reading a lot of Jane Austen pastiches—books that begin with Austen’s world and then go off in magical directions, usually with dragons!

Joyce Harmon has a five-book Regency Mage series about Mary Bennett, and Maria Grace has a 15-book series which starts with Elizabeth and Darcy and then expands, called Jane Austen’s Dragons. Right now I’m zooming through Spellbound at Pemberley by Abigail Reynolds, first in the four-volume Fitzwilliam Darcy, Mage series.

All these series are in Kindle Unlimited, so I’m really understanding binge-reading behavior!

With love and gratitude,

Neil

 

A New Book (and Treats!) from Steve & Rochester

Dog’s Kitchen + exclusive story bundle available now

Neil S. Plakcy

Nov 24, 2025

I’ve created a special early-bird $6.00 Dog’s Kitchen Bonus Bundle just for my favorite readers. It’s only available now through December 15, when the e-book releases to all readers. It includes:

• The Dog’s Kitchen ebook

• An autograph page featuring a golden retriever photo
  My handwriting was never great—my parents used to joke I should become a doctor—and the tremors in my right hand haven’t helped. So I commissioned an artist to stylize my signature instead.

• Dog-friendly recipes including pizza and a fruit plate.

• A printable, color-friendly PDF of holiday greetings from Rochester.

• An exclusive short story, “For Dog and Country,” where Steve and Rochester investigate a holiday theft in River Bend.

  Buy the Special Edition

  If you’ve already pre-ordered through Amazon (I know 219 of you have!) You can easily cancel that pre-order if you buy this way.
  
  Here’s how delivery works:

● You’ll purchase through Gumroad, a platform that sells digital products on behalf of creators. You’ll get your purchase receipt from them.
● After checkout, you’ll receive an email from BookFunnel, which delivers the files.

That email will look like this:

Dog’s Kitchen Special Edition (Ebook)

BookFunnel Code: (generated by your purchase)

BookFunnel Link: (generated by your purchase)

Click the BookFunnel link for each product.

You’ll see options to:

• email the files to yourself,

• download the epub or PDF,

• or send directly to Kindle (if you already have “Send to Kindle” enabled at Amazon).

  

  If you prefer, you can still pre-order the regular edition at Amazon—$4.99 without the bonus story and extras.

  Pre-order Dog's Kitchen

Housekeeping Notes

To avoid confusion (mostly mine!), I renamed Grounds for Hope—which is only one of the two novellas—to Hope and Grace: Stories from the Smiling Dog Café.

Also, Art Taylor runs a terrific blog analyzing the first two pages of a story. I recently participated—here’s my entry about George Clay:

George Clay Blog

With love and gratitude,

Neil