In The Best Little Motel in Texas, Lyla Lane brings together the most delightful tropes from cozy mystery and romantic comedy while adding a slight twist to each. In this homage to Dolly Parton’s filmography, the novel follows an unwilling amateur sleuth, Cordelia West. Having spent much of her childhood as a small-town outcast due to her mother’s alcoholism, Cordelia has worked hard to create a neat, clean life for herself as a librarian in Dallas, Texas, and everything is fine — except for the book bans — until a great aunt that Cordelia didn’t even know leaves her in charge of a motel back in Sarsaparilla Falls.
Straight-laced Cordelia’s personality would have been thoroughly challenged by any return to her chaotic hometown, and as the story develops, Cordelia finds that the motel itself is the least of her problems. Upon arrival, Cordelia quickly learns that what she has inherited is actually a well-established brothel called the Chickadee that is widely accepted, if not supported, by the townspeople. What’s more, land developers have been eying the Chickadee’s acreage, which is why Cordelia’s aunt insisted on such an ironclad will. The small town institution is under a lot of pressure, and then, on Cordelia’s very first night in town, the local pastor dies in one of the rooms.
While Cordelia’s character development and the mystery of the pastor’s death drive much of the plot, the humor and joy of The Best Little Motel in Texas rely on the Chickadee’s residents, the chicks: Daisy, Arline, and Belinda Sue, all in their mid-sixties. These are your favorite eccentric aunties with a mild criminality sprinkled in. They are welcoming and excited to have Cordelia with them, but they don’t exactly make her job easy. The three have been living and working at the Chickadee for decades, and Lane’s detailed descriptions of them combine humor with generosity, the way you might tease someone you love about an unconventional fashion choice. Each of the chicks is confident and comfortable being fully herself, a quality that pushes Cordelia to re-examine the life she’s been building back in Dallas.
Even though the people of Sarsaparilla Falls generally seem to accept the Chickadee, Cordelia and the chicks decide to move Pastor Reed-Smythe’s body to a more respectable location after his death. When the pastor’s body is discovered in the church, though, the scene is suspicious, in no small part due to Arline, who “gets a thrill out of breaking the law.” As it turns out, he didn’t die of a heart attack: he was poisoned. Before she has made up her mind about whether or how to take on her new responsibilities as madam, Cordelia finds herself working alongside the chicks to stay one step ahead of the police, attempting to protect Daisy (whose room the pastor died in) and the Chickadee.
One of the most compelling aspects of the novel is watching Cordelia get slowly but surely integrated back into the town of Sarsaparilla Falls. From the very beginning, Cordelia is determined to limit her time in her hometown. She plans to go to the motel, settle her aunt’s affairs, and then head home to Dallas. The pastor’s death delays her plans, but she still won’t commit to staying at the Chickadee. Much of the tension is driven by Cordelia’s childhood experience of ridicule and exclusion. However, as she becomes more and more intertwined with the people of her hometown, Cordelia starts to “realize she’d built her entire sense of self around the expectations of others,” and eventually, she finds a way to break “from the mold she’d created to cope with her past and started a new life outside of society’s definition of pleasing.”
The whole situation is even further complicated by Cordelia’s budding relationship with Archer Reed-Smythe, the pastor’s son and her childhood neighbor. Archer was a torment to Cordelia when they were children, but when she sees him again as an adult, she is immediately attracted to him. She’s relieved to learn that he’s not a client at the Chickadee, and a classic career woman-returns-to-hometown romance subplot ensues. Amping up the tension further is the fact that Archer works for the FBI, and while he can’t investigate his own father’s murder, he certainly is interested in the outcome of the investigation.
Alongside its cozy, trope-heavy aspects, The Best Little Motel in Texas also includes underlying themes about book banning, censorship, and the pain of living a closeted life in a close-minded place. What’s more, Cordelia’s relocation to Sarsaparilla Falls pushes her to face her childhood traumas, work toward healing, and find ways forward. One of the best qualities of a cozy mystery or romance novel is the sense that things can go right in the end, no matter how challenging the path to that resolution might be. Author Sonia Hartl is already known for her rom-coms and YA novels, and now, under the pen name Lyla Lane, her depiction of the women of the Chickadee, though not necessarily representative of all sex workers, invites readers to open their world “to the rainbow hues of mostly good people trying their best.”
FICTION
The Best Little Motel in Texas
By Lyla Lane
Harper Perennial
Published March 3, 2026
Southern Review of Books 