A must for every mystery lover’s wish list.
A collection of 13 stories commissioned separately over the years as Christmas gifts to patrons of the world’s oldest extant mystery bookstore.
The stories range “from humorous to suspenseful to heartwarming,” editor/proprietor Penzler notes in his introduction, but they all take place at Christmas, are set at least in part at his Mysterious Bookshop, and involve a mystery. Some are actual crime stories, such as “The Gift of King Herod” by Brendan DuBois, Rob Hart’s “The Gift of the Wiseguy,” “The Christmas Party” by Jeffery Deaver, Tom Mead’s “Hester’s Gift,” and Ragnar Jónasson’s “A Christmas Puzzle.” Some have just a whiff of crime: Loren D. Estleman’s “Wolfe Trap” and David Gordon’s “Sergeant Santa,” for example. And some, such as Jason Starr’s “Black Christmas” and Lyndsay Faye’s “A Midnight Clear,” feature no real crimes, just bad choices. Mystery writers themselves take center stage in “Secret Santa” by Ace Atkins, Thomas Perry’s “Here We Come A-Wassailing,” and “End Game” by Martin Edwards. Laura Lippman’s “Snowflake Time” deserves special notice for its prescience. First published in 2017, it’s the tale of a loudmouthed journalist whose air of sweet reasonableness masks his small-minded, misogynistic views and his special animus toward single women who love cats. He gets his. Crime-rich or crime-free, the stories are all refreshingly good-natured and, in the spirit of the season, lean toward peace on earth and good will to most.
A must for every mystery lover’s wish list.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2024
ISBN: 9781613165720
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
A routine whodunit enlivened by the byplay among the author sleuths and their determination to stand up to the patriarchy.
Five real-life luminaries from the Golden Age of detective fiction team up to solve a murder.
Five months after nurse May Daniels disappeared during a day trip in October 1930 from a railway station near Boulogne-Sur-Mer, a farmer finds her bloody body strangled to death. The French police, unconcerned about the damage they’re doing to the victim and her family, announce on scant evidence that May—whose companion, nurse Celia McCarthy, last saw her entering a ladies’ room she never emerged from—was a drug addict who deserves few tears. By that point, the title quintet—Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, Baroness Emma Orczy, Ngaio Marsh, and Margery Allingham—have already sprung into action. Their original motive for traveling to France, proving themselves the equals of G.K. Chesterton and the rest of their condescending male counterparts in the newly formed Detection Club, has morphed into a deep sense of connection to the dead nurse and “an urgent quest to do right.” Working mostly with the reticent, brainy Christie, Sayers, who serves as narrator, methodically retraces May’s last movements and works backward to figure out what she was doing before she and Celia embarked on their trip. Their most promising leads implicate Louis Williams, the son of Mathers Insurance founder Jimmy Williams, as May’s benefactor, beau, and killer. But no reader who’s spent time with any of these writers’ own books will believe that the actual solution will be as simple as that.
A routine whodunit enlivened by the byplay among the author sleuths and their determination to stand up to the patriarchy.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781250280756
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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