DEAD MEN WAG NO TAILS

A pirate fan bites the dust in the run-up to an Oregon buccaneer festival.

Nobody’s more excited about Dead Eye Days—Twilight Cove’s tribute to 18th-century pirate Dead Eye Dawson, the town’s most notorious bad guy—than Jasper Hogan. He even wears his pirate duds to a meeting of the festival’s planning committee, putting him almost literally at swords’ points with history buff Flynn Smith-Wu, who insists that no pirate ever made it as far up the Oregon coast as Twilight Cove. But Jasper never makes it to the festival. When fellow committee member Georgie Johansen goes to check on him a short time before the big day, she finds him in his study lying in a pool of blood. Naturally, Georgie wants to help the police find the killer, and until she does, her time is divided equally between sleuthing and wondering whether her boyfriend, pro baseballer Callum McQuade, really likes her. (Spoiler alert: He does.) Fox gives Georgie everything a cozy armchair detective needs, and then some. In addition to a quaint seacoast hometown and an animal sanctuary she runs with her aunt, Georgie has two rescue spaniels with supernatural powers, an owl, a kitten, and a talkative parrot who used to belong to Jasper. The magical mutts don’t add much pizzaz to the mystery, which ends very much as busybody cozies end. The parrot is pretty amusing, though.

Yo ho ho, but no bottle of rum.