Looking for a great, light-hearted summertime read? If a romantic comedy and a cozy mystery had a love child, it would be titled “Lily Barlow: The Mystery of Jane Dough” by author Carla Hogue. 

In a sweet, funny Southern voice, Lily Barlow has the reader in stitches as she obsesses over the fictional bounty hunter, Stephanie Plum, while she struggles to extricate herself from the dud of a small town where she grew up. 

After her dad’s heart attack, she comes home from the University of Virginia to get the family bakery going again. Underscoring her independence, she temporarily rents an apartment from Miss Delphine Walker, a senior Lily believes may have committed a crime of passion somewhere along the way. 

While keeping tabs on Miss Delphine, interviewing bakery managers, and swatting away the inexplicable romantic overtures from her best friend, Jack Turner, Lily discovers an online clearinghouse, cataloguing murder victims the cops can’t identify. Oh…and she recognizes one of the victims.

Don’t be afraid to fall in love with these characters because LB2 (“Lily Barlow 2: The Mystery in the Mangroves”) picks up where LB1 leaves off.