The Cozy Mystery field guide
Six short guides on the genre — what it is, how it's built, who's writing it, and the rules that make a mystery feel fair rather than cheated. Everything here is free to read, and comes as a printable PDF too — alongside two more (a beat sheet and a genre cheatsheet) included inside Cozy Mystery Scaffold.
What Is a Cozy Mystery?
Where the genre sits next to thrillers and traditional mystery, who's in the cast, and what readers are actually buying book to book.
Free GuideCozy Mystery Tropes
The recurring sleuth, cast, structure, and setting tropes the genre runs on — familiar enough to satisfy, specific enough to make your own.
Free GuideCozy Mystery Rules (The Genre Contract)
What stays off the page, what the reader is owed, and the fair-play test every reveal has to pass.
Free GuideHow to Write a Cozy Mystery
The shape of the genre, the beats every book needs, and where writers actually get stuck — start to finish.
Free GuideFamous Cozy Mystery Authors
A starting reading list — the series that built the genre, and the newer voices reshaping it.
Free GuideCozy Mystery Writing Prompts & Series Ideas
Sleuth hooks, settings, and community angles to build a series around, plus twenty premise starters to spark a first book.
Reading is research. Writing still needs a system.
Once you know the genre, Cozy Mystery Scaffold gives you the structure to write your own — character, plot, and clue-tracking files already set up in Obsidian, plus AI commands that check your actual manuscript against everything in these guides.