Twelve Slays of Christmas by Jacqueline Frost

Twelve Slays of Christmas by Jacqueline Frost

by Carol4 Comments
Mistletoe, Maine, the setting of Twelve Slays of Christmas, is a wonderful little town, the perfect place for Holly to head home to after her wedding is called off. Her family and the town welcome her back with open arms and working at the family Christmas tree farm keeps her busy. In all reality, though she's not too heartbroken over her fiancé; he was a jerk anyway, and good riddance. Then she finds one of the townspeople dead at the farm, killed by one of the candy cane shaped markers. It throws her for a loop, which is understandable, and she feels the need to investigate, both to keep the people she loves out of suspicion and to find justice for the victim. Twelve Slays of Christmas is the first in the series and I think Holly will make a good lead character. She's curious and smart, prone to doing what she wants regardless of others telling her to stay out. I...
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Slade House by David Mitchell

by Carol8 Comments
Maybe I should have read The Bone Clocks first. Maybe I just don't get what makes people love David Mitchell. (Do people love David Mitchell?) Maybe it's just not my typical genre? I read Slade House for the RIP XII Group Read. I don't know if I expected it to be spookier or more interesting or what. It was fine, but when I wasn't listening to it, I didn't think about it. I didn't feel the need to share bits of it with anyone or tell my daughter she needs to read it - she's a horror fan. Slade House is a type of haunted house story. Basically, every 9 years a victim is lured into the house. Each time we get to know the victim; they each have a distinct personality, their own quirks, tragedies, or fears that make them relatable. We get some standard spooky house fare, portraits, creeky stairs, mysterious women looking out the windows, warning disembodied voices. But...
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The Haunted Season by G. M. Malliet

by Carol6 Comments
I skipped #4 in the Max Tudor series, mostly because Father Max was getting married and having a baby and I just didn't want to read about the new family, but I just couldn't pass up the cover for The Haunted Season. Apparently I didn't need to worry about the baby. He is so well-behaved and calm and peaceful that he barely causes a ripple in Max's life. And I guess I shouldn't be surprised, his mother after all is nearly perfect and a healer to boot. Hmm, that sounded meaner than I meant it to. I don't dislike Awena, and in all honestly she's not in much of this book. Lord Baaden-Boomethistle is our deceased, decapitated by a wire strung between two trees while he was out riding his horse. We've got several suspects, mostly members of his family. There are a couple clues, a few secrets, and of course Max manages to put it all together, with some help from...
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Glass Houses by Louise Penny

by Carol10 Comments
I love Louise Penny's Armand Gamache series. If you haven't read it, you should. Do start at #1 though, you'll appreciate them most that way. That being said, this was not my favorite of the series. I liked the whole concept the book is built around, the ideas of Conscience and guilt and judgement. As always, the characters are well-done and I am happiest when a large part of the book revolves around the familiar village of Three Pines, as it does here. There are some new folks in town, most of whom have secrets, but finding out who they are and what they know/have done was interesting. Our old friends are all pretty much the same as always, which is good. Things that didn't work for me: 1. The construction of the story. This story jumps back and forth in time too much and too abruptly. We are at a courtroom trial in the present, but for half of the book we...
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Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore by Matthew J. Sullivan

by Carol3 Comments
I admit it - I picked up Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore based mostly on the title and cover. I have trouble passing up mysteries centered in bookstores. While it was not really what I expected, I enjoyed it. I expected a lighter mystery, more cozy. While not gory or violent, this one is disturbing at times. Lydia is the only survivor of the night the Hammerman killed her friend and her friend's parents, but she hides this fact from everyone. She was a child at the time, but the Hammerman was never caught. Fast forward and now she's an adult, working at a bookstore, living with her boyfriend, who she has not told about her past. As the story opens, Lydia discovers one of the bookfrogs, Joey, has committed suicide in the book store. That would be devastating enough, but in his pocket he has a picture of Lydia as a child, with two of her friends, which is odd...
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Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz

Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz

by Carol4 Comments
I should have loved Magpie Murders. It's definitely a book for mystery readers. Not only does it have two well-plotted mysteries, it has some great quotes about the nature of mysteries and reading. “You must know that feeling when it's raining outside and the heating's on and you lose yourself, utterly, in a book. You read and you read and you feel the pages slipping through your fingers until suddenly there are fewer in your right hand than there are in your left and you want to slow down but you still hurtle on towards a conclusion you can hardly bear to discover.” “As far as I'm concerned, you can't beat a good whodunnit: the twists & turns, the clues and the red herrings and then, finally, the satisfaction of having everything explained to you in a way that makes you kick yourself because you hadn't seen it from the start.” The set up is great, a novel within a novel, both murder...
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