Corpses and Cauldrons (A Witches of Willowbark Cozy Mystery) by Allie Katt, Tasha Oakwood Narrator: Meghan Kelly
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: borrowed from Amazon Kindle Unlimited, supplied by RB Media
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: cozy fantasy, cozy mystery
Series: Witches of Willowbark #1
Pages: 254
Length: 5 hours and 23 minutes
Published by Tantor Media on July 14, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads
The first hint that this magical town is teetering on the edge of supernatural disaster? The corpse in the cauldron.
Not attracting attention in Willowbark is a little hard to do when your inherited apothecary shop is brimming with magic, your cat might be a dragon, and someone just turned up dead in the middle of the Halloween festival… inside one of the decorative cauldrons. Festive, right?
Add in local witches, vampires with attitude problems, and a coven watching my every move, and yeah—blending in isn’t exactly going well.
I’m Aurora Hart. Middle-aged apothecary. Occasional spell-caster. Reluctant untangler of magical messes. I came back to Willowbark thinking I’d heal some hearts, keep my head down, and maybe brew a few calming teas. Instead, I’m knee-deep in a murder, a centuries-old pact no one wants to talk about, and a broody stranger whose very presence seems to be ticking someone off in a very murdery way.
The town may look quaint, but don’t let the cinnamon-sugar smiles fool you—magic here is hidden for a reason. And someone’s willing to kill to bring it to light.
My Review:
I picked this one up because when I’m in the right mood, cozy fantasy is a very comfortable and comforting place to be, and to read. It’s kind of fantasy-lite for me. The settings are purely fantasy, but the stakes are, not so much smaller or lower, but closer to real life – even if the characters are a bit unreal or extra-real – and the solutions tend to be considerably less violent.
It’s not that the protagonists don’t face crises and enemies and consequences, but that the solutions to all of the above do not come out of epic battles that leave behind epically bloody battlefields and epically high butchers’ bills.
Legends & Lattes set the template, in that Viv and Tandri have real issues opening their coffee shop, between old enemies and rapacious gangsters, but the old enemy gets hoisted on his own petard of karma, and the gangster leader ends up taking her ‘protection’ payment in cinnamon rolls.
Corpses and Cauldrons sounded like a combination of the cozy fantasy vibes of Legends & Lattes, Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea and Adenashire with the cozy witchiness of stories like Witchlore, the Fix-It Witches and The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches. And I was definitely there for that idea.
The way that the story opened, with Aurora Hart honoring her beloved grandmother’s legacy in Willowbark by keeping her apothecary open – and giving herself a fresh start – seemed like the cozy start to a new cozy fantasy adventure.
Once Aurora finds a dead body suspended in a cauldron over the town square, the story is off and running. In magically multiplied directions.
Escape Rating C: In spite of the promising start, in the end I had plenty of mixed feelings about this one. Also, I mostly listened to the audio, and I have mixed feelings about that as well.
The opening was a surprise and a short, sharp shock, for the reader as much as for the protagonist. But as the local police bumble their way more than usual through the murder investigation, and as Aurora consequently begins her own clandestine inquiry, the story felt less like a new cozy fantasy adventure and more like a recycled one. I felt like I’d read ALL of the elements before, from the exclusive coven with the mysterious hidden agenda to the ensorcelled mundane police to the secret-keeping familiar to the protagonist’s self-doubts and shaky magical abilities.
There were a lot of elements and plot points I’d read before, and perhaps a few too many of them for the start of a series. Each of the individual bits was fun, but the combination was a bit overstuffed with familiarity when concentrating on the uniqueness of the characters and spacing out the crises over more story – or more books – might have left time for more of the elements that were unique to this particular story and setting.
If the story had gotten a bit more into Aurora’s previous life, OR more about the history of Willowbark, or more snarky comments from Aurora’s cat-dragon familiar, the story would have felt fresher. Because there are too many recycled elements and not nearly enough explanation of the weird peace between the witches and the vampires – or how the vampires manage to walk in the daytime but not under a full moon.
A little too much of the story read like deja vu all over again. But I still finished it because I got more than caught up in it enough to want/need to find out how it ended.
My mixed feelings were certainly exacerbated by the audio. Initially the narration was a bit, well, wooden. It wasn’t so much voiced – as simply and unemotionally, read. There wasn’t as much emotion or inflection as is usually the case in audiobooks, and the pauses and breaths didn’t always feel like they were in the right places in the reading.
As the story continued, the narrator put more emotion in the portrayal, but the initial chapters were hard to listen to. But it did get better as the story continued, perhaps as the narrator became more familiar with the characters.
The best parts of the story were certainly Aurora’s growing friendship with Maeve Muskberry as well as Aurora’s virtual adoption into the Muskberry clan, AND her ongoing negotiations with the familiar she inherited from the grandmother. I loved the Floofmeister when he was a cat, but he was a lot more fun when he revealed his true identity as the dragon “Bertrand Firefeather the Almighty, Breather of Flames”. I might come back after all just to get more of his particularly haughty brand of snark. We’ll see.
