If, like me, you miss the days when cozy mysteries were more about low violence than marketing opportunities involving special hobbies and recipes inside, may I introduce you to Sheila Simonson. Her writing isn't remotely cutesy, as even some old-fashioned cozies could be, which is why I call her type of stories traditional—low violence stories based on good storytelling and good writing (very good in her case with both), usually with a small town setting, and with relationships and understanding of people at their core.

An Old Chaos is the second in her LaTouche County mystery series set in the Pacific Northwest. Like the first book, this is a beautifully literate read that draws you in until you're buried in its flow without realizing it. When I say literate, I don't mean that it tries to impress you with big words or obscure quotations, although heroine Meg McLean is a librarian. I mean that the prose is beautifully crafted and evocative, telling the story smoothly but effectively, making for very easy but richly enjoyable reading.

A landslide buries a newish development of expensive houses, killing six people. This would be one thing if it had simply been an unpreventable act of god, but just before the landslide, word had started to leak about warnings against building there that had been suppressed. Obviously corruption was involved, but exactly who got paid off, how and why, and by whom?

Meg and Sheriff's Investigator Rob Neill are the central investigators in a story about past corruption and new crimes to maintain the cover-up, but part of the fun is that the story isn't told wholly from their viewpoint. You see how events affect Rob's cousin, come to visit at the wrong time, Madeline Thomas, principal chief of the Klalos Indians and a person of considerable local power, a "girls just want to have fun" efficient young nurse forced to face a lot more than going home with a loser, and more. I'm not usually a fan of that sort of round robin viewpoint, but it's very well integrated here and really makes for a much more interesting story, in large part because the characterization is so well done.

Highly recommended for a lose yourself in it story about believably real people you care deeply about in a believably real setting, dealing with unimaginable but all too believable events.