Mockingbird Court (Shady Hollow, #6) by Juneau Black Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: cozy fantasy, cozy mystery
Series: Shady Hollow #6
Pages: 272
Published by Vintage on October 7, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
In the latest installment in the beloved Shady Hollow series, everyone's favorite vulpine investigator Vera Vixen must contend with a cold-hearted killer—and the ghost of her own past.
It's a crisp, cool autumn in Shady Hollow, and preparations are underway for the annual Harvest Festival. Creatures have flocked from far and wide to partake in the seasonal festivities, from pumpkin carving to pie tasting to soup throwing. With all these new faces around town, it’s the perfect time for someone to slip in unnoticed.
Unless that someone is Bradley Marvel, the most famous author—and most noticeable personality—in any woodland warren. It seems the wolf is on the lam. Back in the city, a body was found in his penthouse apartment at Mockingbird Court, and Marvel skipped town before the questioning could commence.
Marvel claims to be innocent, and it's up to Vera and her friends to piece together what might have happened that fateful night so many miles away in the beating heart of the big city. But things get complicated when Vera learns that she also knows the victim ... and might even be implicated herself.
My Review:
Just as it is in the ‘real’ world at the moment, it’s time for the Fall Harvest Festival in cozy, charming, Shady Hollow. Investigative reporter Vera Vixen has been eagerly anticipating the coming festivities and can’t wait to get back home from a research trip to the ‘big city’ to participate.
And, of course, report on the events for the local newspaper, the Shady Hollow Herald.
Vera did not come home expecting to be followed from the city. First by best-selling thriller author Bradley Marvel (featured nuisance in Cold Clay). Bradley is on the run from a murder committed in his city apartment (the building is named Mockingbird Court). Bradley says he didn’t do it, but he claims he can’t risk the publicity ruining his reputation, so he runs away to Shady Hollow, pretty much in plain sight because he can’t resist an audience even when he’s theoretically on the lam.
Vera doesn’t like Bradley all that much. He made a showy, demanding, egotistical pest of himself on his previous visit. But it’s the news of just who the victim was that sends REAL shivers up Vera’s spine.
Rick Renald was Bradley’s book editor, so Bradley does have a motive for the crime. But Vera does – or at least did – have a better one. Once upon a time, when Vera was a young and naïve cub reporter, Rick, a handsome, charming, slimy snake of a fox, was HER editor. Also her lover. AND the person he framed to take the fall for the blackmail scheme that HE was conducting among the town’s movers and shakers.
She fled the accusations and the shame, taking a series of jobs in remote little towns and villages, eventually working her way back up the journalistic ladder to her current beat in Shady Hollow. A place she’s come to call home.
No one in Shady Hollow knows anything about Vera’s past. And she’d have preferred to keep it that way.
But a big city police detective, Wendell Knox, has come to Shady Hollow to bring back SOMEBODY to answer for Renald’s murder He’s already found more than enough circumstantial evidence to want to question Vera right along with Bradley Marvel AND Marvel’s efficient but secretive assistant.
Vera knows that no one’s secrets EVER survive being touched by a murder investigation. Once Knox discovers her old secrets, and she’s certain he will, she’s going to move up his list from merely A suspect to THE suspect.
Even though she knows she didn’t do it. Which means that she’s going to have to prove who did before she gets hauled back to the city in pawcuffs.
Escape Rating B: Shady Hollow is both a cozy mystery and a cozy fantasy, but it’s the mystery elements that drive the story – in spite of all the people being animals. Surprisingly, it’s not twee at all, not once you get used to the place. This time around it was all too easy to see the big city that everyone talks about as the big city in Zootopia.
(That big city detective, Wendell Knox, is even a bison. In my head, I’m picturing Chief Bogo from Zootopia, who is a cape buffalo. They’re not the same, but they’re close.)
Shady Hollow reads like it’s located somewhere between Zootopia and Adenashire, because Adenashire’s population, while it seems to be mostly humans, elves and dwarves, also includes people who are wholly or partially animals, like the fennex Jez in A Fellowship of Games and Fables.
The cast of characters in Shady Hollow are just people in fur-suits, meaning that they act like, well, us, with all our best AND worst behavior. Which is what puts this series over the line from cozy fantasy to cozy mystery.
Because the point of each story is the investigation of a murder. And generally, a murder that disrupts the quiet, cozy atmosphere of the little town. This time hits a little close to home, both in that Vera is the prime suspect trying to clear herself, and because the entire town rallies behind her.
There’s no magic in Shady Hollow, unless you count the magic of keeping yourself from wondering about the intimate relationships of some of the mixed species couples, like Vera Vixen and her boyfriend, Police Chief Orville Braun, whose name is a play on his own species. Orville is a brown bear, or bruin.
No matter the species of the characters, the story in Shady Hollow is very much a part of the cozy mystery genre. It takes place in a small town where there are a few colorful and/or eccentric residents, and the townsfolk are generally friendly and supportive of each other. There’s a big event going on in town that draws people in and either somebody gets dead or somebody local gets accused of a crime while the interrelationships between the local residents are highlighted as one of the usual ‘suspects’, either the local police officer, or in Shady Hollow’s case, the local newspaper reporter, investigates the crime, second guesses the official investigation, puts themselves in danger from the criminal hiding among them, and finally saves the day and the person wrongly accused.
In this particular case, it’s not, well, the case that drives the story. Instead, it’s Vera’s confrontation with her past, her appreciation of her present, and the family of choice she has built in her new home. Which, in the end, is exactly what saves her from the ghosts she left behind in the big city.
Leaving an older, somewhat sadder, but significantly wiser Vera to celebrate the annual Harvest Festival with good friends, great food, delightful entertainment, with her friends around her and the monkey of her past finally off her back.
If you’re in the mood for something cozy that still has a bit of bite to its story and to its perspective on people of all kinds, shapes, sizes and quantities of fur or feathers, Shady Hollow is a marvelous place to visit. This book in particular will leave you eager for pumpkin spice season in your own little corner of the world. While this reader is eagerly awaiting the next season to be explored on a future visit!
