Tag: More Mystery Please

Crimes for Christmas

Edited by Otto Penzler, Christmas Crimes at the Mysterious Bookshop: Twelve Tales of Seasonal Suspense Set in the World’s Oldest Mystery Specialty Store offers readers a grand collection of holiday murder and mystery short stories by noteworthy, award-winning and international bestselling authors, including Jason Starr, Lyndsay Faye, Loren Estleman, Ace Atkins, Rob Hart, Laura Lippman, Jeffery Deaver, David Gordon and Martin Edwards.

Some of these Christmas tales are treasures that take you back to the golden era of crime fiction. My favorite is A Christmas Puzzle by acclaimed Icelandic author Ragnar Jónasson. I felt as if I had discovered a lost manuscript of Christie or Marsh. The pacing, the subtle clues, the climax…perfection!

Aficionado of misdirection and the locked room mystery, UK author Tom Mead offers readers a fun holiday twist on an old theme in Hester’s Gift. Though other reviewers may give more details in an overview about the story, I don’t want to lay out any clues before your eyes reach the actual page.

Each of the stories has a different feel to it. In fact, Laura Lippman’s ironic tale, Snowflake Time, seems like it could be ripped from the headlines.

I own several of Penzler’s previous collections and enjoy pulling them out each year. This one is no exception. I highly recommend Christmas Crimes at the Mysterious Bookshop.

While I received an advance reader’s copy from The Mysterious Press, courtesy of NetGalley, I’ve already purchased a digital version so that I can re-read these wonderful stories. Order online or buy now at your favorite independent bookstore. Mine is Sellers Books and Art in Jim Thorpe, PA.

Review by Di Prokop
More Mystery Please

*If you enjoy holiday mysteries as much as I do, be sure to check out the Second Annual More Mystery Please Santa Advent calendar, beginning December 1.

My new favorite Christmas mystery

I think USA Today bestselling author Alexandra Benedict may have just given me the gift of my most favorite Christmas mystery novel of all time – The Christmas Jigsaw Murders.

After receiving a parcel with six jigsaw pieces on her doorstep, Edie O’Sullivan, a crotchety octogenarian and renowned crosswords setter (whom I imagined as Stephanie Cole AKA Doc Martin’s Auntie Joan) must solve the most important puzzle of her life.

A cryptic note with the package read, “Four, maybe more, people will be dead by midnight on Christmas Eve, unless you can put all the pieces together and stop me.” Signed, Rest in Pieces.

Recognizing something worrisome pictured in one of the puzzle pieces, Edie shares some of what she knows with her nephew/adopted son, DI Sean Brand-O’Sullivan. When a man is attacked and left for dead with a jigsaw piece in his hand, Sean forbids Edie from investigating any further in an effort to protect her.

Needless to say, Edie — a self-proclaimed pain in the arse, who has always gotten in her own way but has always done everything she could to protect Sean — is determined that she is the only one who can solve the mystery but she will have to face her demons to do so.

Also author of The Christmas Murder Game and Murder on the Christmas Express, Benedict gives readers everything we need in a page-turner of a modern-day Christmas mystery. A ticking clock, characters with rich layers of back-story and humor, red herrings, suspects and true to the title, you need all the pieces to really solve the puzzle.

I ho-ho heartily recommend The Christmas Jigsaw Murders to fans of British mysteries, cozy mysteries, Christmas mysteries, LGBTQ+ mysteries and fans of anagrams, which Benedict has peppered throughout the novel, with nods to Dickens, Christine McVie and Fleetwood Mac.

I received an advance readers copy from Poisoned Pen Press, an imprint of Sourcebooks, courtesy of NetGalley. Order online or buy now at your favorite independent bookstore. Mine is Sellers Books and Art in Jim Thorpe, PA.

Review by Di Prokop, More Mystery Please

*If you enjoy holiday mysteries as much as I do, be sure to check out the Second Annual More Mystery Please Santa Advent calendar, beginning December 1.

Sweet story

The Maid has been on my TBR for some time now, so when I learned that Molly the maid and other characters from Nita Prose’s #1 New York Times bestseller were featured in a holiday-themed novella, I had to read it.

While The Mistletoe Mystery was a sweet story, ala O. Henry, I was disappointed that there was no real mystery. I liked the characters and kept waiting for something exciting to happen. It didn’t.

I recommend The Mistletoe Mystery for holiday romance fans or Nita Prose, who might just be happy to see some of their favorite characters in a holiday setting without needing the novella to be a true mystery.

I received this advanced reader copy from Ballantine Books, courtesy of NetGalley. Order online or buy now at your favorite independent bookstore. Mine is Sellers Books and Art in Jim Thorpe, PA.

Review by Di Prokop
More Mystery Please

*If you enjoy holiday mysteries as much as I do, be sure to check out the Second Annual More Mystery Please Santa Advent calendar, beginning December 1.

I couldn’t read fast enough

In her historical fiction debut, New York Times bestselling author Donna Jones Alward deftly weaves a remarkable story of two women’s lives impacted by the Great War and a horrific maritime disaster in When the World Fell Silent.

We meet Nora Crowell and Charlotte Campbell in Halifax, Nova Scotia at a time when the town’s port served as an important harbor not only for traditional seafaring but for military vessels in WWI.

Nora is an unmarried nurse at Camp Hill Hospital, caring for veterans with devastating injuries and lives with her sister’s family. Charlotte is a young war widow with a toddler, who is treated practically as an indentured servant by her late husband’s family.

After the December 6, 1917 tragedy, the largest man-made explosion in history prior to the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945, decimates Halifax, killing roughly 2,000 people and injuring 9,000, for those that survived, life will never be the same.

Jones Alward paints not only the women but also her supporting characters with such rich detail, both subtle and real, in this gripping and emotional tale.

As Nora’s and Charlotte’s stories began to intertwine ever more closely, I found myself wishing I could read even faster than I usually do to move the words from the page to my brain, to my heart more quickly.

I highly recommend When the World Fell Silent for fans of historical fiction, fans of World War I-era fiction and novels with strong women characters. Fans of Donna Jones Alward’s romance novels will be also enjoy this book. I received this advanced reader copy from Harper Collins UK, One More Chapter courtesy of NetGalley.

Order online or buy now at your favorite independent bookstore. Mine is Sellers Books and Art in Jim Thorpe, PA.

Cryptic Phrase Sets Tone for Murder at Land’s End

Cornwall is one of my most favorite places on Earth, so I was thrilled to get the chance to read Murder at Land’s End by Sally Rigby.

In this the third book of the series, Detective Inspector Lauren Pengelly and Detective Sergeant Matt Price lead the investigation into the murder of a young woman, whose body was found on the rocks off the coast of Lands End, the western most point in Cornwall and the most southwesterly point on the British mainland.

As I hadn’t read the previous installments of the series, I was amused to read that Price, a young widower relatively new to the Penzance police station, has an aversion to dead bodies. I imagined it presenting itself much the way the blood aversion affects Doc Martin, in the series by the same name, set in Port Wenn (actually Port Isaac), also in Cornwall. However, his voice in my head sounded more like Ralf Little, who portrays DI Neville Parker in Death in Paradise.

The cryptic phrase, “Men must work and women must weep,” was found on a piece of paper in the victim’s mouth. While it took me only seconds with a Google search to learn that the phrase was taken from The Three Fishers, a poem by Charles Kingsley, Pengelly put a member of her team into investigating its meaning, making it seem a little unrealistic to me.

I enjoyed the premise, the setting and the characters but the story, however, didn’t quite hit the mark for me. Even with the discovery of a second body, more suspects, a tricky family crisis for Pengelly, the overdone narration and not enough of a twist at the end, left me feeling like there was something missing. I so wanted to love Murder at Land’s End.

I received this advanced reader copy of Murder at Land’s End from Storm Publishing, courtesy of NetGalley. Order online or buy now at your favorite independent bookstore. Mine is Sellers Books and Art in Jim Thorpe, PA.

Can’t-Put-It-Down-Rainy-Day-Read-Ride

Bestselling author and 2023 Edgar Award nominee Sulari Gentill took me on a can’t-put-it-down, rainy-day-read ride that had me finishing The Mystery Writer in less than 10 hours even with a packed day of innkeeping duties for a full house of B&B guests.

The title drew me in. The prologue intrigued me. Chapter One’s first paragraph had me wondering what I was getting myself into and whether or not I should just close the book. Luckily, just paragraphs later I met Theo and was hooked.

Theodosia Benton left law school and showed up on her attorney big brother’s Kansas doorstep, having not seen Gus since he left Australia when she was just 10 years old.

Inspired by events from her life back in Tanzania, Theo was determined instead to become a writer, a goal Gus supported, encouraging his little sister to follow her dream never expecting what came next. The dream turned into a nightmare when her brother became the prime suspect in the murder of the man, who had become Theo’s mentor.

I highly recommend The Mystery Writer. With engaging characters, as well as a couple of conspiracies, expected and not, you’ve got a gripping mystery in store.

I received this advanced reader copy of Poisoned Pen Press, courtesy of NetGalley. Order online or buy now at your favorite independent bookstore. Mine is Sellers Books and Art in Jim Thorpe, PA.
 
 
 

Edith Wharton – amateur sleuth

The Wharton Plot opens with famed author, Edith Wharton, playing a game of negotiation chess with her publisher over lunch, when a young novelist that “sells well” enters the restaurant in old New York with a chrysanthemum in his lapel and challenges Edith’s ideas of story and what real women are like.
 
That scene sets our gilded age heroine on a journey to find her next project, her personal next chapter, and a murderer as well.
 
Fredericks does a marvelous job showing both the rivalry and camaraderie of authors and how Wharton and her circle evolve during this time period, as the old guard and their monuments begin to disappear, and crafts a mystery that keeps the reader or listener guessing.
 
I will not hold the fact that I didn’t really enjoy listening to The Wharton Plot – my first full-length audiobook – against the author or the book or the narrator. I’ve listened and been moved by NPR Radio’s Selected Shorts but I just didn’t have much patience listening to this novel-length work.
 
I do, however, highly recommend reading The Wharton Plot. I wish I had. I received this advanced reader audio copy of The Wharton Plot from Dreamscape Media, courtesy of NetGalley.

Order online or buy now at your favorite independent bookstore. Mine is Sellers Books and Art in Jim Thorpe, PA.

Spenser is back

Thank you, Mike Lupica and the Robert B. Parker estate for bringing us back an old friend in Broken Trust.

It’s been more than a decade, maybe even two since I last visited Boston via a Spenser novel, featuring the rough and tumble private eye with the heart of a poet, his sidekick, Hawk (don’t tell Hawk I called him that ;), and his lady love, Harvard-trained psychologist Susan Silverman.

I hadn’t realized how much I missed the trio, their banter, the literary references (lots of Red Sox references too) and, of course, the case Spenser must solve.

In Broken Trust, we meet Spenser moving into a new apartment in his old neighborhood, a good way for someone new to the books, a longtime Parker fan or someone who remembers the 1980s tv series Spenser for Hire, based on the novels.

This particular mystery revolves around a science nerd turned philanthropist-billionaire acting out, his concerned wife, his business partner, assistant and everyone involved in a gazillion dollar merger in the sixth-richest man in the world’s synthetic lithium company.

The New York Times bestselling novelist, Mike Lupica, did an outstanding job of giving readers Spenser’s voice in this 50th Spenser novel, with as much depth and clarity as the late Parker himself.

I highly recommend Broken Trust and look forward to going back and reading more of my favorite Beantown PI. I received this advance reader copy from G.P. Putnam’s Sons, an imprint of Penguin Random House, courtesy NetGalley.

Order online or buy now at your favorite independent bookstore. Mine is Sellers Books and Art in Jim Thorpe, PA.

Wow! Just Wow!

When was the last time a murder mystery/suspense thriller left you with tears in your eyes and a lump in your throat? For me, it was never but that was before I read Lori Rader-Day’s beautifully written, expertly woven The Death of Us.

The award-winning author of Death at Greenway and The Lucky One takes the reader on an emotional ride with rich characters, red herrings, subplots and suspects aplenty in Parkins, a small town where everyone thinks they know your story or they just fill in the blanks.

When a rusted old car with a dead body is pulled from the quarry down the road from Liss Kehoe, old secrets, wounds and gossip are dredged up that could destroy her and all she holds dear. Fifteen years earlier a young woman had shown up at her front door asking for her baby’s daddy, handed the infant Callan to Liss and disappeared into the stormy night. That now grown Callan and his friends had discovered the car poking out of the deep black water. What would happen if and when the truth came out?

I was reading The Death of Us on the beach practically oblivious to everything else around me except that my husband was trying to decipher a seller’s disclosure and condo association rules on his cell phone screen. I knew that I should really be paying close attention to the details – I did try – but my mind was with Liss and what was happening in the climax of this incredible novel.

I highly recommend The Death of Us to not only mystery and suspense fans but everyone. Lori Rader-Day is an amazing writer and I can’t wait to see what she has next for us.

I received this advance reader’s copy from William Morrow Books and William Morrow Paperbacks courtesy of NetGalley.
Order your copy online or buy now at your favorite independent bookstore. Mine is Sellers Books and Art in Jim Thorpe, PA.

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