(courtesy Penguin Books Australia)
A digital preview copy of Cheddar Luck Next Time provided by Angry Robot Books Books in return for an honest and objective review; the novel released 8 April 2025.
Cosy mysteries are becoming quite the thing.
It makes sense – we live in a world rapidly spinning into fascism, climate catastrophe and all manner of fascistic horrors – so why would people not want to flock to stories that offer not just comfort but the sense that all the trailing bloodied loose ends of life can in fact find resolution and an often evasive sense of finality.
Cheddar Luck Next Time, which offers a pun-filled title that whoever came with the alternative fromage-friendly to the Eurhythmic’s song “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” will no take to their brie-filled heart, delivers on every front when it comes to reassuring us that awful though life can be, good things can still happen in their dumpster-on-fire midst.
Set in the small central coastal Californian town of Foghorn, which is little more than a pretty strip mall, an old mansion-turned-function centre and some houses, the novel centres on “cheese-obsessed” Bird Nichols who is on the autism spectrum and designs the artisanal cheeseboards which she bases her business on, and which have made her a social media darling, on her sensory needs.
Newly arrived in Foghorn after the deaths of her parents the previous year in a car crash and the presumed drowning of her unconventional grandmother who owned the property she now calls home, Bird is ready for a fresh start and thinks the town she visited as a child might be just the place to do it.
For many years, I had been of the belief that a sizeable hoard of delicious cheese is what makes a house a home. By that rule, my grandma’s old place was going to be the best home ever.
She loves cheese and it in her cheeseboards that she finds some sanctuary and peace.
But Cheddar Luck Next Time is a cosy murder mystery and while the opportunity for Bird to find a new life and future success is very much there, so is a body count which begins with her finding the body of the town troublemaker, a man who she and her ersatz grandfather, Grizz, just kicked off her property for being a nuisance, dead in his crashed car with his throat cut.
She is an immediate suspect, as is Grizz, and while the local police make it very clear they don’t need any help from her to solve the crime, Bird can’t help but get her Jessica Fletcher on and try to figure whodunnit, if for no other reason that she needs to look after Grizz who is the only family of any kind she has left.
Sporting a distinct Midsomer Murders vibe, Cheddar Luck Next Time doesn’t pretend that anyone is particularly happy to have Bird poking around in their business.
While she becomes good friends with some key people in the town, including with the owner of the local gourmet grilled cheese van who may just be a love interest to romantically liven things up, Bird also encounters some fierce resistance from people who see her as nothing more than an interfering descendant of her notorious grandmother.
(courtesy official author site)
So, not all warm and cosy then?
No, but that adds to the substance of this charmingly diverting novel which doesn’t exactly reinvent the amateur detective novel but which has a great deal of warmhearted fun playing around with the various tropes and cliches we love and which we have come to expect will be in these types of stories.
You won’t walk away from Cheddar Luck Next Time brimming with the audacious imagination of a genre-busting story that defies convention and pushes the cosy mystery envelope but that’s more than okay because what Cato does is use the pieces at her disposal quite well, giving her sweetly light novel some real substance and emotional weight courtesy of a traumatised protagonist who has to deal with the usual things that bedevil all of course while ensuring she doesn’t meet with sensory overload.
It’s the author’s evocative and empathetic understanding of what it is like to live as someone diagnosed with autism that gives Cheddar Luck Next Time some real heft and presence.
At every stage of the way, Bird is not presented as some overcoming amateur sleuthing titan who is able to find out things that the people who do law enforcement for a living fail to see, but as a very fallible, normal human being who doesn’t get everything right but who gets enough of it in place to summon up the happy ending we all need and want.
He was taken aback. ‘I wasn’t expecting the cheese inquisition!’ He sounded as friendly as ever.
I busted out laughing. ‘Nobody expects the cheese inquisition!’
‘You know your classic Monty Python.’ By his nod, I felt like I had met some high level of approval.
The novel is also a very Gouda (sorry; not sorry) love letter to cheese.
The creation of each of Bird’s gloriously lovely cheeseboards in described in just-enough detail to whet your appetite, and their reception by a host of clients sets the scene for Bird as the bringer of good and wonderful things to lots of people; so while the authorities may barely tolerate her, and some local powers-that-be treat her with scorn, it’s clear that Bird is a good person who’s overcome a lot and who deserves all the good things coming her way.
And that’s what we want, apart from a cracker of a mystery solving moment – which we get along with some very quirky and emotional wrenching narrative twists and turns – is for the protagonist of any cosy murder mystery to find peace even as she helps those affected by the crime/s to find it too.
Bird gets all that and more, and a feisty but loveable ginger cat called Bumper, with her adventures in mystery solving and live filling Cheddar Luck Next Time with real warmth and sweetness but also some very sage lessons about dark life can be and how you don’t simply bounce back like nothing has happened.
There’s a lot of ground for Bird to make up, and while all the mystery solving, which kicks off before she’s even unpacked a single box in her new home, delays that somewhat, it also propels her journey forward to, with love in the offing, some personal issues resolved and a sense that while life can hand you some terrible moments indeed, it can also make things infinitely better too … and maybe even catch a killer into the bargain!