A little crime with your crafting? Anyone whose ideal relaxing weekend at home includes not only time with their favorite craft tools, but a few hours curled with a good book, will want to look into some of the mystery series featuring craft-y detectives.

Mystery fans know the genre includes several different type of fiction including the niche known as cozies.” Cozy mysteries tend take place in a friendly small town and feature an ordinary person who investigates mysteries initially because of an accident of circumstance, not as profession. As the name implies, cozies offer the comfort of neatly wrapping up the mystery rather than creating a sense of looming menace as in some darker styles mystery writing. Cozies offer a touch of gentle humor and a circle of friendly if mildly eccentric characters supporting the detective. Crafting and cozies make a perfect match, a fact that several writers have discovered. Plus, the books often provide tidbits of information on various crafts.

In Cricket McRae’s Home Crafting Mystery series, accidental detective Sophie Mae Reynolds keeps bumping into corpses in small town Washington state. Both the fictional character and her creator are soapmakers.

Craft shop owner Jo McAllister and her friends uncover crafty killers in Mary Ellen Hughes’ Crafty Corner series. The amateur sleuth discovers crimes and unravels them with her friends at settings such as craft fairs, beading classes and origami workshops in Maryland.

CPA Kelly Flynn finds support from her Colorado small town knitting circle as she solves crimes and develops a new romance. Maggie Sefton’s mystery books also give the reader a bonus. recipes and knitting patterns are included in each book.

Joanna Campbell Slan penned seven scrapbooking how-to books before deciding to set mysteries in this mileau. The detective, Kiki Lowenstein, is a scrapbooking mom living in St. Louis. Every book in the series includes scrapbooking tips.

For more on craft cozy mysteries, check out this reading list.