Spellbound By Murder – Where Gilmore Girls Meets Charmed Meets Cozy Mystery

Last Updated on April 22, 2026

Some new books grab you with the cover, others with a well-known author, this one – Spellbound By Murder – had me with its tagline: ‘Gilmore Girls meets Charmed‘.

So, I know this is showing my age, but both of those shows were staples in my teenage years, and my love for Lorelai, Rory, and the Charmed Ones hasn’t diminished in the years since.

Can you imagine my excitement when I was offered an advance copy? I was straight in there, and overall it did not disappoint.

So let me tell you all about Spellbound by Murder and why you might like it!

Heading Home To Mystic Hollow

Veronica Blackthorne and her teenage daughter, Phoebe, live in Florida, but after a pretty desperate call from her grandmother, V packs up their lives, loads the car up, and heads back to Mystic Hollow, Connecticut.

Gran has had a fall and is really struggling to work in her bookstore, Mystic Books, so it is up to Veronica and Phoebe to pick up the slack, get the store back on its feet, and, oh, organise the town’s upcoming literary festival.

So, not much to do then!

The duo soon gets to grips with their new lives, and with the help of Kim, who works in the store after school, things are soon looking up, except for one thorn in Veronica’s side,  Almira Leach, the store manager of Fox N Sox Books in the next town over.

Almira has her beady eye on buying Mystic Books, and she is willing to do whatever she can to make sure that the store fails so she can swoop in and get her hands on it.

Then comes the literary festival. When the keynote speaker drops out at the last minute, Veronica (herself a budding writer) calls in a favor from author of the moment, Adam Whitford.

Adam duly obliges and soon arrives in Mystic Hollow, much to the delight of his legion of fans, but everything goes wrong when Adam winds up dead.

Who Could Have Done It?

Clearly, this is where the mystery kicks in as Veronica soon finds herself in the local sheriff’s crosshairs.

I mean, we know she didn’t do it, and even the sheriff knows, deep down, that she didn’t do it, but with hundreds of visitors at the literary festival, and the prime suspects all having fairly solid alibis, the Blackthorne ladies are at a loss as to who would want to kill Adam.

Queue the use of a little magic to help them on their way because yes, Gran, and the women in her family tree, all have the ability to cast the odd spell for good, or at least to get them out of a sticky situation.

So with Phoebe rapidly learning enough Latin to read the magic book, and Veronica not above using a spell to help her focus on the suspects, we soon discover that Adam might have been embroiled in a plagiarism scandal.

There’s also a rival author, an agent who may or may not have been recently ditched, a woman claiming he stole her ideas and a brother with an inheritance on the line.

Suffice it to say, the mystery is ultimately solved with plenty of groundwork laid for the next book in the series.

Too Much Gilmore Girls?

While I really hoped that this book had the vibe of the Gilmore Girls, I genuinely didn’t expect it to sooooo much like the original TV show.

The similarities are never ending. From naming the town Mystic Hollow (Stars Hollow) to the coffee-obsessed Veronica, the back-and-forth mother-daughter quips and banter, to the overbearing, wealthy mother who insists on a weekly dinner, it could have been an actual episode of the show.

There was a point where I just started picturing Lauren Graham and Alexis Bledel in my head as I read the book.

Throw in a magical owl, some spells, a lot of tech to uncover the culprit, and it ended up being a little bit of a mash-up of everything author Stacie Ramey could think of to put in the book.

And therein lies a small problem with Spellbound By Murder. It is frantic and frequently goes off in random directions.

Veronica is the equivalent of a cat getting distracted by a laser pointer, which sets her up for the usual poor decision-making that hinders more than it helps.

By the end, though, I really, really wanted her to just pause for a nanosecond and think. Take a breath. And for Pete’s sake, stop talking!

What worked so well in the TV show didn’t translate to the page. It’s very hard to do quippy banter at speed in a book. I mean, it’s not impossible, but here it just got on my nerves a little.

Overall Thoughts

Despite this, and even though Spellbound By Murder is not without its issues, it was still a very easy breezy read.

It has plenty of Fall vibes, a cute town, lovely residents, a dash of magic, and a decent mystery to solve.

Veronica may have tested my patience, but I still enjoyed it, and actually, would read the next in the series, if only to see where the Blackthornes’ lives go now that they have settled into Mystic Hollow.