Funny mysteries

I like my mysteries to have a lot of humor, with a focus on interpersonal relationships, and not much gore.

The Meg Langslow books by Donna Andrews are some of the funniest mysteries I've ever read. In the first book, Murder with peacocks, Meg goes home to Yorktown to organize three weddings-- her best friend's, her brother's, and her mother's. The Kirkus review said it "will leave you helpless with heartless laughter", and it does. Meg's parents, brother and sister, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc., have their little quirks, but they're very endearing, and they play important roles in all the books in the series. Some of my other favorites in the series are Revenge of the wrought iron flamingos (Meg at a Civil War reenactment), Crouching buzzard, leaping loon (Meg investigates problems at her brother's computer games company), and We'll always have parrots (Meg attends a fan convention for her fiance's TV series).

Anne George's Southern Sisters mysteries star Patricia Ann (60 years old, 5' 2" tall, 110 pounds) and her sister, Mary Alice (she started counting her birthdays backwards when she turned 65, says she's 5' 12" tall, and admits to weighing 250 pounds). Patricia Ann says that if they hadn't been born at home she'd swear that one of them had been switched at the hospital. If you have a sister, you'll agree with me that she has their interactions down perfectly. I can read these over and over, and laugh every time. The series begins with Murder on a girls night out and finishes with Murder boogies with Elvis.

Jane Haddam wrote five funny mysteries under the name Orania Papazoglou. They take place within the romance-writer community in New York City, and you have to love them just for their titles: Sweet, savage death; Wicked, loving murder; Death's savage passion; Rich, radiant slaughter; and Once and always murder.