Claire Malloy series by Joan Hess

This slightly older (80s/90s) crime fiction series is told from the point of view of widowed mother Claire Malloy, 39-year-old owner of a bookshop in Farberville in the rural Midwest. She has a 14-year-old daughter, Caron, and an on-and-off relationship with Lieutenant Peter Rosen, a policeman from Farberville.

And somehow, she keeps stumbling upon the weirdest homicides. A wiccan cult loses one of its members in a sunrise ritual. A local artist finds a corpse in the stylized coffin he uses in his most recent art installation. A teacher is poisoned with peach stones (which contain cyanide, who would've thought?). And in the book I'm currently reading, the protagonist of a staged crime (one of these murder mystery things in country inns) is found dead. As in, really dead, not only dead as he should be according to the script.

The thing is, much like Miss Marple, Claire never goes looking for crime. The criminals seem to be drawn to her. Also, she never sets out to investigate, but then ends up doing so regardless of her original intentions. The snide, puberty-ridden comments of her daughter and the strange characters she encounters along the way serve to make the series a well-rounded experience: There's enough comedy to make them thoroughly enjoyable, even if the murders (and the murderers, to say the truth) are not totally plausible and sometimes the loose ends are violently forced into making sense. I still own a copy of every one that has ever been translated into German. (Last week I discovered there were quite a few that have never been translated, I was appalled! - and ordered copies right away.)

Will you do Germany a favor and translate them, Laura?