Donna Andrews. Owl Be Home for Christmas. St. Martin’s, 2019.

Donna Andrews has written a series of cozy mysteries with names of birds in the titles. Owl Be Home for Christmas is the first we have read. It is entertaining and contains some of the things we especially like about the cozies.

In such mysteries the victims are either extremely likeable—no one can understand why anyone would want to kill them—or extremely dislikeable—everyone is a suspect. Owl Be Home for Christmas runs just under 300 pages, but the murder does not happen till a third of the way through the book. And even then, it may not be a murder as the death could be from natural causes. Still most readers of the genre realize about twenty pages in that Dr. Frogmore is doomed.

Doctor Frogmore is one of about two hundred ornithologists attending a symposium or convention on the biology of owls. Most are associated with universities or other groups that include naturalists like National Geographic or the Audubon Society. They are meeting at a hotel and convention center in rural Caerphilly, Virginia, when they are socked in by a blizzard. No one can leave the hotel for days. The only person who arrives comes via snowmobile.

So, yes, this is a kind of extended closed room mystery, The Mousetrap with a cast of three hundred. About two hundred are convention attendees. They make the likeliest suspects, but Dr. Frogmore has managed to alienate some of the other hotel guests as well as most of the staff. Frankly, even our narrator, Meg Lanslow, could be a suspect. She is there as one of the convention organizers, helping her ornithologist grandfather. Her family is there with her—her husband and two sons.

Like other mysteries that take place in a similar setting, there are stolen key cards, rooms that are generally off-limits, and definitely some cabin fever. Meg’s teenage sons see the thing as more of an adventure. Just as there are basement chambers and tunnels in the hotel, the boys dig a tunnel system connecting various doorways and cabins under the snow.

The tale is lots of fun to read, and we do sympathize with the many people who have been not just victims of Frogmore’s rudeness, but whose professional reputations may have been hurt. The plot takes a number of twists and turns. How can you have an autopsy at a snowed-in hotel? What about the doctor’s food allergies? Or the vial of nitroglycerin spray found at the death scene?

Andrews is very good at staging. So we get a good sense of the convention seminars, the dinners, the hotel offices, the cabins, and so on. And unlike The Christmas Hummingbird, Owl Be Home for Christmas actually presents accurate information about a variety of owls. It also illustrates different discussions and disagreements bird scientists have among themselves. We were thinking, as soon as Dr. Frogmore was introduced, that his name was appropriate, too. There are some tropical nocturnal birds like nightjars and whippoorwills known as frogmouths. They are not owls, but they do have some similarities. At one point they are even mentioned in the book.

Those tunnels under the snow may act as symbols for the mystery. It is easy to take a wrong turn, and it is hard to see very far ahead, but if the tunnelers do not panic, they will find their way.