Bubble, Bubble, Tea and Trouble: A Cozy, Spooky Return to Cape Cod

Read time: 4 minutes

📱📖 Read on Kobo 📃 304 pages ⏱ Duration: 4 hours
Genre: Cozy Mystery 🏷️ Publisher: Kensington Cozies (ARC by NetGalley)

Book Blurb:

When Cape Cod tearoom owner Lily Roberts stumbles across a group of women running an amateur séance in her grandmother’s B&B, she assumes it’s an odd hobby gone wrong. The group, missing their leader Katya, is convinced the house is haunted, though Lily knows better. The real haunted house might actually be next door, where Lily’s boyfriend happens to be staying. Before anyone can sort out the mix-up, Katya turns up dead at the bottom of a cliff. Now Lily has two things to juggle: serving afternoon tea, and figuring out who wanted the medium gone for good.

Let’s talk … murder!!!

There is something about a Vicki Delany book that I can only consider a spell. Not the abracadabra kind. The kind where you open to the first page and suddenly the rest of your day just… isn’t happening. Bubble, Bubble, Tea and Trouble pulled that off again, just like the previous seven books in the series.

I read this almost without a break, because I could not put it down long enough to do anything else. Knowing what Bernie was going to dig up next, needing to sit in the kitchen while Edna and Rose traded their usual barbs, wanting to be a fly on the wall during Katya’s séance, and definitely wanting to hear Amy Redmond tell everyone to stay out of her investigation right before showing up for tea anyway (both literally and figuratively).

Here’s what struck me most about this seventh installment: the mystery doesn’t feel manufactured. Lily and her circle aren’t racing around playing detective. They’re just noticing things. Clues land more like a happenstance rather than getting chased down, and that restraint is what makes the whole thing feel real. You could imagine doing exactly what Lily or Bernie does, because most of us aren’t trained investigators. We’re just people who pay attention, more or less, when the situation calls for it, and researches online.

The supernatural thread running through this one is genuinely eerie, not gimmicky. The echoes between the present-day death and something from the past gave me actual chills, and Lily’s own unease didn’t surprise me. She’s lived in that house for years without a single ghost sighting, and she knows perfectly well Katya is a fraud. And yet. There’s a difference between knowing something isn’t real and still feeling creepy about it, and Delany nails that gap.

Seven books in and this series hasn’t lost a single step. If anything it’s gotten more confident. Vicki Delany, please write faster. I am begging.

Would I recommend it?

Without hesitation. This is exactly the kind of cozy that reminds you why you fell for this author’s writing in the first place: warm, funny, a little spooky, and completely un-put-downable. If you’ve read any of the earlier Tea by the Sea books, this one delivers everything you’re hoping for. If you haven’t, honestly, what are you waiting for? Mark July 28th on your calendar, because this one is worth the wait and then some.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

You might also like:

• Tea & Treachery by Vicki Delany If you want to start from the very beginning of Lily’s story, this is where Tea by the Sea began, and where the tearoom and the whole cast of characters first came together.
  Indiebookstores.ca | bookshop.org | Goodreads | StoryGraph | Pagebound | Fable | Hardcover | OpenLibrary | Litsy

• Death by Darjeeling by Laura Childs Another tea-shop sleuth to fall for, this one set among the historic gardens of Charleston instead of Cape Cod, but with the same cozy blend of tea and trouble.
  Indiebookstores.ca | Bookshop.org | Goodreads | StoryGraph | Pagebound | Fable | Hardcover | OpenLibrary | Litsy

• By Book or By Crook by Eva Gates Written by Vicki Delany under a different name, this one swaps the tearoom for a library built inside a lighthouse, and it’s just as charming. Indiebookstores.ca | Bookshop.org | Goodreads | StoryGraph | Pagebound | Fable | Hardcover | Booktrovert | OpenLibrary | Litsy

• The Ghost and Mrs. McClure by Alice Kimberly If the séance angle in Bubble, Bubble, Tea and Trouble was your favorite part, this one leans even further into the supernatural, with an actual ghost solving crimes alongside its heroine.
  Indiebookstores.ca | Bookshop.org | Goodreads | StoryGraph | Pagebound | Fable | Hardcover | Booktrovert | OpenLibrary | Litsy

• Meet Your Baker by Ellie Alexander For more of the baking-and-murder combination that makes Lily’s tearoom scenes so much fun, this one follows a pastry chef running her family’s bakeshop while sorting out a suspicious death.
  Indiebookstores.ca | Bookshop.org | Goodreads | StoryGraph | Pagebound | Fable | Hardcover | Booktrovert | OpenLibrary | Litsy

Would You Trust a Séance in Your B&B?

Katya’s group got the address wrong and still swore the house was haunted. Would you want to know if your own house had a history like this one, or would you honestly rather not? Tell me in the comments. I want to know if I’m the only one who’d immediately start googling old newspaper archives.

Book Links

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Indiebookstores.ca | Bookshop.org
Goodreads | StoryGraph | Pagebound | Fable | Hardcover | Booktrovert | OpenLibrary | Litsy
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