The Lizzy and Diesel series guide covers the three Wicked books, their reading order, the magical stone hunts and what the cozy mystery census reveals about the genre.
What Shapes Your Experience of the Lizzy and Diesel Series
A pastry chef in Salem, Massachusetts, a big blond man who walks through locked doors and a monkey with a rude gesture all appear in the Lizzy and Diesel series by Janet Evanovich. The books sit in the paranormal corner of the cozy genre, so the mood is closer to a treasure hunt with jokes than to a puzzle with a closed circle of suspects. Lizzy Tucker bakes cupcakes by day and can sense enchanted objects, which makes her useful to Diesel, who recovers magical stones before his cousin Wulf can claim them. Whether that premise suits you depends mostly on how much magic you want alongside your murder.
Each novel chases a different stone tied to one of the seven deadly sins: gluttony in the first book, lust in the second and avarice in the third. The clues matter less than the banter, the romantic tension between the leads and the chase through Boston streets and New England harbor towns. Readers who prefer a fair-play whodunit may find the plots loose. Readers who like their cozies light and fast will likely finish all three in a long weekend.
Reading Order, Series Length and Other Tips Before You Pick Up a Lizzy and Diesel Book
The reading order is Wicked Appetite, Wicked Business and then Wicked Charms, the last of which Evanovich co-wrote with screenwriter Phoef Sutton. Every Lizzy and Diesel book wraps up its own hunt, so you could technically jump in anywhere. Still, the partnership and the rivalry with Wulf grow from one novel to the next, and the first book explains Lizzy’s gift and the rules of the stones. Anyone searching for the Lizzy and Diesel series in order will find that the trilogy is short enough to read straight through.
Diesel also appears in the holiday novellas of the Stephanie Plum series, and Plum Spooky introduces both Wulf and Carl the monkey. Reading those first is optional, since the Wicked books explain everything a newcomer needs. Four of the seven stones remain unfound at the end of the third novel, so the story is open even though the trilogy works as a complete set. The series page tracks whether a fourth title is ever announced.
How the Flood of New Cozy Mysteries Changes the Way Readers Find Their Next Series
Choosing a series from scratch is harder than it looks because of sheer volume. According to Cozy Mystery Book Review, its Cozy Mystery Census puts the yearly output of English-language cozy mysteries at about 4,000 new titles, while only about 3% of them are cataloged by the Library of Congress. The same census finds that 70% of cozy series are self-published, so many of these books arrive outside the traditional channels that produce neat catalog records.
For a reader, that gap means a search result or a bestseller badge says little about how long a series is or where it begins. A trilogy like the Wicked books is easy to size up, but other series run to dozens of novels with several spin-offs. Before committing, it helps to check how many novels a series has, when the first one appeared and in what order they should be read. That is exactly the information the series and author pages collect in one place.
How Cozy Mystery Book Review Counts and Checks the Cozy Genre
The Census rests on two sources. One is the yearly figures shared by CozyMystery.com, and the other is the site’s own sample of 946 new releases and 150 randomly drawn series. Every number published from it comes with a stated source and sample size, so readers can judge how far a figure can be trusted. That is how the self-publishing share and the overall yearly count can be traced back to their origins.
The same habit shows in how individual series are presented. The Lizzy and Diesel series page, for instance, states the number of novels, gives the year the first one appeared and lists the three books in reading order. Reviews of single titles, such as Wicked Appetite and Wicked Business, link back to that page so the context is always one click away.