Summer Coven Review: A Queer Cosy Mystery With a Corpse in It

The monsters we use to scare ourselves make the kindest faces in the room.

Some monsters get a change of lighting. In Summer Coven, the second Dead & Breakfast Mystery from Kat Hillis and Rosiee Thor, the vampires run a bed and breakfast, the witches sell their charms by the hour, and the scariest thing in town is a fully booked inn during a murder case. This is paranormal cosy mystery, not folk nightmare, and it knows exactly what it wants to be. Arthur Miller, undead private eye and no relation to the playwright, is trying to file his taxes and clear his husband while a poisoned pet psychic drops dead at the solstice festival.

Sal, his flamboyant other half, is no help at all, which is rather the point. My four-star review digs into why this queer cosy mystery works, where its married-vampire double act earns your affection, and the one reservation that holds it a notch short of the top. If you want comfort reading with a corpse in it, a warm small town full of oddballs, and an old settled love treated as the happy ending it is, Trident Falls has a room going. Here is what Summer Coven gets right, and where it wobbles.

Summer Coven | Kat Hillis & Rosiee Thor | Berkley | 25 August 2026 |

A pet psychic drops dead at a summer solstice festival. She is poisoned by a potion she never saw coming. That grim little joke tells you what sort of book you have wandered into. Nobody is being punished for our sins here. Nobody is unravelling in an attic. Summer Coven wants you cosy, well fed, and quietly delighted. It gets its way inside a chapter.

This is the second outing for Arthur Miller. No relation to the playwright, a running gag the book never lets him forget. He and his husband Salvatore Conte are married vampires. They have swapped eternal brooding for something far scarier: running a small business. Their bed and breakfast, the Iris Inn, sits in Trident Falls, a made-up pocket of rural Oregon. It reads like the town Forks would have been if it had a sense of humour about itself. Business is finally booming. Arthur has hung out a shingle as a private eye. And then the coven arrives.

Let me be upfront about what kind of experience this is. Getting it wrong would sell the book short. Summer Coven is a low-stakes comfort read built around a murder. The dead body is a plot device, not a source of terror. Kat Hillis and Rosiee Thor keep the violence off the page and the warmth firmly on it. That is the oldest trick in the cosy playbook, and they pull it off with real affection. You are not meant to be frightened. You are meant to want to move in.

The comedy is the load-bearing wall. Sal is the engine of it. He is a flamboyant disaster. He treats every moment as a chance to perform and every serious talk as a suggestion he can ignore. He is chaos in a cravat. Hillis and Thor know that a character this loud needs a straight man, and Arthur is a lovely dry one. He spends the book trying to file his taxes and clear his husband of murder in the same afternoon. Their marriage is the real hook. Not the whodunit. Not the witches. Just two people who have loved each other for several human lifetimes and still bicker like the honeymoon never ended.

Sal is a lot. He is meant to be a lot. Whether he tips from endearing into tiring is down to you. It depends on your patience for a man who cannot read a room to save his afterlife. I read his refusal to take anything seriously as a comic strategy, not an accident. It lets Arthur carry the weight. That way the book can look at what it costs one partner to be the sensible one. Read Sal as a choice and he sings. That is the read the text supports.

On craft, the writing is brisk and unfussy. It is built for speed, not for lingering. The prose never stops to admire itself. That suits a book that lives or dies on comic timing. The puns arrive at a rate that would wear out a lesser writer.

The two-author job never shows its seams, which is its own small feat. Two writers sharing a keyboard usually leave a wobble in the voice. There is a spot where one hand takes over from the other. I could not find one. Arthur sounds like Arthur all the way through. Sal sounds like Sal. The joint voice holds its register from the first page to the last. Writing comedy with a partner is like juggling with someone you have to trust without looking. These two clearly do.

The book runs several mysteries at once. This is where the sequel outgrows the first one. The murder of the pet psychic braids together with Arthur’s first proper case, the hunt for their friend Brody’s missing mother. Add a thread of coven fraud and a missing pet that pays off some open questions from book one. Not every strand lands with equal force. The missing-persons thread shows its hand a touch early.

A sharp reader will be a few steps ahead of Arthur on at least one reveal. That is a common cosy quirk, and it barely dents the fun. You are not here to be outwitted. You are here for the company. And the company is good. The town’s ensemble does a lot of the heavy lifting, from a werewolf who runs the café to an elven coroner and a chosen family of regulars. You will want to know all of them. That is the real trick of a cosy.

Beneath the puns, the book is quietly about something. Its core subject is belonging. More exactly, it is about the hard work of building a life in a place that was not built to welcome you. Arthur and Sal are outsiders three times over: undead, queer, and new in town. Trident Falls tolerates its odd folk rather than embraces them. The book keeps circling back to a sum that outsiders know by heart. It is the daily maths of how much of yourself to soften so the neighbours stay comfy. Hillis and Thor never turn this into a lecture. They let it live under the jokes, which is exactly where it belongs.

There is real weight, too, in the picture of a long queer marriage. Genre fiction still tends to treat queerness as a start: a coming out, a first kiss, a rough road to being accepted. Summer Coven does something rarer. It writes an old, settled, unshowy love. It is the sort that argues about taxes and cheese platters. Then it treats that plainness as the happy ending it is. Queer futures feel shaky at the minute. So there is something quietly bold about two immortal husbands whose biggest crisis is a fully booked inn during a murder case. The book puts hope on the table and never makes a speech about it.

Where does this sit in the authors’ arc? Kat Hillis is early in her career, and this series is her proving ground. It is where she welds her love of vampires, mysteries, and appalling puns into one reliable machine. Rosiee Thor arrives with more mileage, mostly in young adult fantasy, from Tarnished Are The Stars to Fire Becomes Her.

They have also done tie-in work for Life is Strange and Firefly, plus a Lambda-nominated turn in the Being Ace anthology. Thor’s writing has always chased queer inner lives and chosen family. You can watch that concern move straight into the cosy adult register here. What Summer Coven confirms is that the pairing has found its groove. The first book was a charming test run. This one reads like a series that knows just what it is.

Place it in the genre honestly and it belongs to the paranormal cosy mystery, a corner having a real boom. More precisely, it belongs to the rising wave of proudly queer cosies. If you want book comparisons rather than lazy screen ones, try a few. Think Vivian Shaw’s Dr Greta Helsing novels for the warm undead red tape. Think Sangu Mandanna’s The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches for the found-family heat.

Think Mia P. Manansala’s Tita Rosie’s Kitchen Mysteries for the small-town murder frame. Manansala blurbed the first book, and you can feel her cadence here. What sets this series apart is the marriage at its heart. Most cosies chase a slow-burn romance across a whole run of books. This one skips the will-they-won’t-they and hands you a couple who already chose each other. Then it mines the comedy from the aftermath. In a crowded field, that is a fresh move.

The vampires. The witches. The small town where something is always slightly off. It turns every stick of it toward warmth instead of fear. There is a quiet argument in that, worth sitting with. The same monsters we use to scare ourselves can, with a change of lighting, become the kindest faces in the room.

Read Summer Coven when the world has been too much and you need proof that the undead can be kind. It will not scare you, and that, it turns out, is the whole point.

Summer Coven is the rare cosy mystery where the scariest words are “fully booked” and the pet psychic never saw her own poisoning coming, which is a bold career move for a psychic. Read it, groan at Paige Turner, and let two married vampires do your taxes.

Summer Coven (A Dead & Breakfast Mystery Book 2) by Kat Hillis , Rosiee Thor 

Everyone’s favorite vampire odd couple is back for another bloody good time in this new supernatural mystery from the authors of Dead & Breakfast.

Arthur Miller (no relation to the playwright) and his beloved, Salvatore Conte, are settling into their (para)normal lives in Trident Falls. Finally, everything seems to be going swimmingly…business is booming at the inn and Arthur is hard at work on his first case as a private detective: finding their friend Brody’s missing mom.

But when a pet psychic is felled by a poisoned potion she (somehow) didn’t see coming, Arthur’s investigation takes an enchanting turn – and not in a good way. It turns out the psychic was a member of the Celestine Coven, a powerful group of witches who sell their charms for a price. Did the pet psychic find herself on the wrong side of the coven? Or did she trigger someone’s pet peeves with her predictions? It will require all of Arthur’s wit and Sal’s whimsy to solve this murder, find their missing person, and avoid becoming part of the witches’ wicked brew.

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