Genre: holiday mystery

Grade A #BookReview: What Child is This? by Bonnie MacBird

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews
Grade A #BookReview: What Child is This? by Bonnie MacBirdWhat Child is This? (Sherlock Holmes Adventure #5) by Bonnie MacBird, Frank Cho
Format: ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery, holiday fiction, holiday mystery
Series: Sherlock Holmes Adventure #5
Pages: 228
Published by Collins Crime Club on October 13, 2022
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

It’s the season of peace and goodwill, but a Victorian Christmas is no holiday for the world’s most popular detective in this new book from Bonnie MacBird, author of the bestselling Sherlock Holmes novel Art in the Blood.
It’s Christmastime in London, and Sherlock Holmes takes on two cases. The angelic three-year-old child of a wealthy couple is the target of a vicious kidnapper, and a country aristocrat worries that his handsome, favourite son has mysteriously vanished from his London pied à terre. Holmes and Watson, aided by the colourful Heffie O’Malley, slip slide in the ice to ensure a merry Christmas is had by nearly everybody . . .

My Review:

I wasn’t expecting to find a Sherlock Holmes story to include in my personal Ho-Ho-Ho Readathon. Not that I wasn’t willing to, considering how much I love Sherlock Holmes stories, but rather that Holmes can be a bit of a curmudgeon at the best of times.

He may not be, in any way, a miser like Ebenezer Scrooge but he’s certainly more than capable of bah-ing and humbug-ing with the best of them. Or the worst of them as the case might be.

And then I remembered that the Holmes series I just started earlier this month with Art in the Blood, included a Holmes’ Christmas tale, and to paraphrase the Great Detective himself, the game was afoot.

What Child is This? (yes, the question mark is part of the title and it’s driving me batty) connects two stories with loosely similar themes under the banner of the holiday season and runs away with them. Or sets them on fire. Or a bit of both.

The Marquis of Blandbury, Henry Weathering, comes to Holmes because his adult son Reginald hasn’t written to his mother in weeks, and the woman is beside herself because it’s so very much not like him. Even dear-old-dad, who does not seem the worrying sort, is worried – if only second hand. He’s more concerned about his wife’s peace of mind than his son’s current whereabouts but even the rather blunt instrument that is the Marquis knows that something isn’t right and he expects Holmes to find out precisely what.

The other case, the much more serious case, is one that literally drops into Holmes’ and Watson’s laps. Or at least falls right into their hands. They witness a well-to-do woman and her attendant get attacked by a crazed assailant who knocks them both over as he plucks the woman’s little boy right out of her arms. And attempts to flee with the child through the crowded streets.

With Sherlock Holmes in hot pursuit, Watson attends to the women who have been so grievously assaulted. Holmes doesn’t manage to catch his man – but he does successfully rescue the little boy and restore him to his mother’s waiting arms.

The two cases don’t have anything in common beyond the fact that both originate with potentially missing sons. Of course, Holmes, with Watson’s able assistance, solves both cases.

But neither case goes to any of the places that the reader originally believes they will, and the solutions are far from orthodox. They are both cases where Holmes displays the heart that he would claim that he does not have – with his dear friend Watson there, as always, to record that he does.

Escape Rating A: I loved this – and I think I loved it more because it feels like the characterizations of Holmes and Watson read like they owe a lot more to the screen adaptations of the past OMG 40 years, starting with Jeremy Brett, than they do to the earlier portrayals of Basil Rathbone and even the original Holmes canon itself.

Not that the two cases aren’t every bit as confounding and convoluted as any of the Holmes’ stories penned by Conan Doyle, but rather that the characters of our two protagonists have been made just that bit more human and more sympathetic than the original ‘thinking machine’ and his idiot sidekick.

Instead, this is a portrayal where Holmes is aware that he is just a bit ‘different’ from most people, and where Watson knows and understands that part of his purpose in Holmes’ life and in their long friendship is to allow Holmes to explain his deductions – even as he stinks up their apartment with his experiments.

There is a mutual respect in that friendship – a respect that would have had to have existed for Holmes to have tolerated Watson’s inability to follow his genius and for Watson to have tolerated Holmes’ frequent high-handed treatment of him. There’s also an awareness on Watson’s part that these are NEVER fair play mysteries. Holmes always keeps secrets even when that lack of knowledge might endanger Watson’s life.

The solutions to both of these cases are extremely unorthodox – which made them that much more fascinating. Something that was made even more clear to me as I listened to The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle, the canon story with which this adventure was very loosely in dialogue. THAT Holmes would never have come to either of these resolutions, but THIS Holmes is all the better for doing so.

I liked my first taste of this author’s Sherlock Holmes Adventures in Art in the Blood, but I really got into this interpretation with this Christmas story. There are three stories between Art and this one, and the events of those stories was teased just a bit in this one – more than enough to make me eager to read them.

And I’m definitely looking forward to the latest entry in the series, The Serpent Under, coming in January!

#BookReview: Chaos at the Lazy Bones Bookshop by Emmeline Duncan

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: Chaos at the Lazy Bones Bookshop by Emmeline DuncanChaos at the Lazy Bones Bookshop (Halloween Bookshop Mystery, #1) by Emmeline Duncan
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: cozy mystery, holiday mystery, mystery
Series: Halloween Bookshop Mystery #1
Pages: 256
Published by Kensington Cozies on July 23, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Bailey Briggs adores her year-round Halloween-themed town of Elyan Hollow, Oregon, but when she takes over her grandfather’s beloved bookshop, Lazy Bones Books, she accidentally discovers the town’s secret dark side . . .
Normally, spooky season is Bailey Briggs’ favorite time of year, and her Halloween-themed small town’s time to shine. But between managing Lazy Bones Books, working on her graphic novel-in-progress, and running the Spooky Season Literary Festival, Bailey hardly has a moment to enjoy Elyan Hollow’s spot-on seasonal vibes. Not to mention, at every turn she seems to be tripping over the contentious crew of Gone Ghouls, a ghost-hunting reality TV show currently filming around town. Bailey tries to stay focused on the Lit Festival, which is supposed to kick off Elyan Hollow’s annual Halloween Fair; instead, this year’s festival begins with a murder . . .
It’s bad enough Bailey discovered the victim, but now, as a lead suspect with some (admittedly) damning evidence pointing her way, she’s got to clear her name! With the help of her librarian friend, Colby, and Jack Skeleton, her world-class bookshop dog (and the absolute bestest boy ever), Bailey sets out to solve a murder . . .
As her investigation weaves through family secrets, professional rivalries, and town feuds, the list of suspects is growing fast . . . and unfortunately, so is the list of victims. If Bailey doesn’t find the killer soon, Elyan Hollow’s haunted reputation will get a little too real . . .

My Review:

Elyan Hollow, Oregon seems like just the kind of idyllic small town that makes people who read small town cozy mysteries – which this most definitely is – want to live in a small town just like it.

Elyan Hollow reads as if it’s exactly what you’d get if real towns like Frankenmuth, Michigan or nearby Leavenworth, Washington had decided to embrace The Nightmare Before Christmas all year round instead of, well, actual Christmas.

The town has truly embraced the ‘Spooky Season’, after a cozy horror movie was filmed there decades ago. The movie-set tourists brought so much to the town that Elyan Hollow decided to ‘lean in’ all year round.

Which explains both the name of Bailey Briggs’ bookstore, Lazy Bones Books, AND the theme of the town’s first annual literary festival, sponsored by Lazy Bones, of course, as part of the kickoff for this year’s Halloween season extravaganza.

Both fortunately and unfortunately, it also explains the town’s nearly magnetic attraction for horror authors (YAY!), paranormal romance writers (DOUBLE YAY!) and ghost hunting TV and streaming series (definitely not so yay).

Bailey has her hands full of the festival when all of those magnetic attractions collide in murder – with her shop and her festival at the center of a local detective’s suspicions and investigations.

Leaving Bailey, as the prime suspect in not one but two murders, desperate to clear her name. Which leaves her in precisely the situation that has put so many reluctant but innocent characters on the road to becoming amateur detectives.

Especially as Bailey has her own personal mystery to solve in the midst of this case. The first murder victim might very well have been the name that belonged in the blank spot on Bailey’s birth certificate labeled ‘father’.

Escape Rating B: There are a LOT of mysteries in Elyan Hollow – and the murder turns out to be the least interesting of them all. It’s also one of the few mysteries that gets resolved by the end of the book. Which is a good thing as this is the first book in a projected series.

On one side, there are the mysteries surrounding Bailey’s family – most of which do not get solved in this first book but absolutely do have an impact on Bailey and the story.

Bailey was raised by her grandparents because her teenage mother refused to let an accidental pregnancy spoil her plans to become a doctor. Which she did. Bailey grew up feeling like an afterthought in her mother’s life, well aware that the family her mother created at the proper time is her mother’s REAL family in seemingly all the ways that counts.

Bailey’s grandparents WERE her parents in all the ways that counted, but there are still plenty of holes in Bailey’s heart as well as in her knowledge of where she came from – such as the totally missing information about who her sperm donor might have been.

There are also plenty of current family secrets, as her grandfather has already deeded the family bookshop to Bailey but has not revealed that fact to Bailey’s uncle who is constantly scheming and digging for ways to wrest control of it for its prime downtown location. That’s a mystery that must be coming to a head later because it’s still VERY murky at the end of this book.

Then there’s the festival, the ghost program, and the returning hometown boys made more-or-less good who have come back for one or the other. Both men went to high school with Bailey’s mom, but neither have returned home in the intervening years. Both have secrets that may possibly have to do with Bailey – but it’s no secret that neither can stand the other.

Yet, when one of them is murdered, all the police suspicion falls on Bailey – which feels like more than a bit of a stretch on the part of an overwhelmed detective grabbing at straws and circumstances instead of anything remotely like a real investigation.

Which is where Bailey’s amateur efforts inevitably come in.

I fell in love with Elyan Hollow, and I REALLY liked Bailey and her ‘Scooby Gang’. It helps a LOT that Bailey has every reader’s dream job of owning and running a bookstore – and that it’s dreamy enough that she’s being VERY successful at it though dint of her own hard work. Her best friend is one of the librarians at the local public library, and their bonds to books and over books really shine through.

The mysteries that needed to get solved got solved, but the family mess is, well, messy and that looks like it will continue to be so in the books ahead.

In the end, this series starter reminded me a lot and fondly of Small Town, Big Magic (before the protagonist discovers that she’s really a witch) and Shady Hollow (only with human people instead of animal people). The small towns all have similar charms and the characters have similar and endearing quirks. (Check out my review of the latest book in the Shady Hollow series, Summers End, later this week to see if you agree.)

All of which means that I’ll be keeping my reading eye out for the second book in the Halloween Bookshop Mystery series whenever it appears out of the mist of anticipated reads.

Review: The Christmas Appeal by Janice Hallett

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
Review: The Christmas Appeal by Janice HallettThe Christmas Appeal (The Appeal, #1.5) by Janice Hallett
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: holiday fiction, holiday mystery
Series: The Appeal #1.5
Pages: 208
Published by Atria Books on October 24, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

This immersive holiday caper from the “modern Agatha Christie” (The Sunday Times, London) follows the hilarious Fairway Players theater group as they put on a Christmas play—and solve a murder that threatens their production.
The Christmas season has arrived in Lower Lockwood, and the Fairway Players are busy rehearsing their festive holiday production of Jack and the Beanstalk to raise money for a new church roof. But despite the season, goodwill is distinctly lacking among the amateur theater enthusiasts with petty rivalries, a possibly asbestos-filled beanstalk, and some perennially absent players behind the scenes.
Of course, there’s also the matter of the dead body onstage. Who could possibly have had the victim on their naughty list? Join lawyers Femi and Charlotte as they investigate Christmas letters, examine emails, and pore over police transcripts to identify both the victim and killer before the curtain closes on their holiday production—for good.

My Review:

When we open the pages of texts and emails between newly fledged lawyers Femi Hassan and Charlotte Holroyd and their retired mentor Roderick Tanner and read, along with Femi and Charlotte, that he has another epistolary mystery for them to solve in regards to the Fairway Players it all seems just a bit familiar. And a bit cringeworthy. After the correspondence among the Fairway Players that Tanner asked Hassan and Holroyd to wade through in their earlier mystery, The Appeal, that cringe is entirely justified.

Because the Fairway Players were a LOT. And still, apparently, are. Not even a different lot, for the most part, as those events rather cost them a lot of membership – along with prestige and more than a bit of cash.

It also, in the end, took out the Church Hall Roof where they perform – or at least the gargantuan patty of bat guano that was discovered during that epic production did. Let’s just say that not only were there bats in that belfry – along with the belfries of some of the Players themselves – but that the escape of those bats left quite the calling card.

Ahem.

The thing about the pile of correspondence that Hassan and Holroyd had to wade through began with no certainty that a crime had been committed. There seemed to be plenty of dirty dealing, underhanded bargaining and outright shenanigans among the group, but being an arsehole, or even an entire company of arseholes, is not covered under the penal code.

Fraud, however, is another matter, as Hassan and Holroyd eventually proved. To the point where anyone would be surprised to learn that the Fairway Players had survived that debacle.

But the show must go on, even if its former directors are serving time, and the Fairway Players have indeed continued their amateur thespian productions, with occasionally catastrophic results. Again.

The pile of assorted texts and emails is considerably smaller this time around, as the play at the heart of the matter is merely a one-night panto to raise money for that Church Hall Roof that the bats had such a disastrous effect on.

The question for the new lawyers, just as it was in The Appeal when they were still in training, is whether or not ANY of the events that surround their disastrous production of Jack and the Beanstalk constitute a criminal offense under any statute.

The mummified corpse that tobogganed out of the massive old prop beanstalk notwithstanding. Or perhaps, with all the standing for a charge of murder.

Escape Rating A-: I have to admit that my first question when I saw this book was whether it was a good idea to go back to the scene and the style of The Appeal. It was absolutely fantastic and I loved every page of it, but I wondered whether it would work to revisit that scene and most of those people and particularly whether it would work if done exactly the same way.

Epistolary novels, meaning stories told through correspondence, are difficult to pull off at the best of times. The Appeal did it so damn well that there was a lot of potential for a second bite at that apple to turn out to have gone ‘off’ a bit and would sour the original along with it.

That’s not the case, not at all. Because these people are STILL a collection of hot messes and time has not made any of their situations any better. The Christmas Appeal does not sell the reader on the joys of community theater, because there’s more drama offstage than on and a lot of the internal relationships are downright toxic, but for the reader it does create that same compulsive need to turn page after page from the beginning to several potential bitter ends.

At first, the correspondence covers petty rivalries, equally petty jealousies, the usual number of folks not keeping their commitments, and the general pandemonium of putting on a production utilizing the skills and talents of folks who are all volunteers and can – and do – flake off whenever life happens. Which of course it does, pretty much all the time.

At least until the mummified skeleton slides out of the old theater prop in the middle of the show and the questions all shift from “are we going to pull this off” to “who was that mummified man in the Santa hat and how did he get stuffed in there?” Along with the when and why questions about that same stand in, so to speak, for Jack Skellington.

Just because there’s a dead body, it doesn’t mean that there’s been a murder. Which is what Hassan and Holroyd have to decide, now that they have all the facts. While we, the readers, have all of the speculation.

Leading to just the kind of holiday mystery to keep any reader on the edge of their seat, flipping pages, as the spirit of the holidays ensures that the show is a success, the Church Hall Roof is saved, and justice gets served along with the plum pudding.

If you like your holiday stories to be every bit as twisted as the stripes on a candy cane, The Christmas Appeal might prove just as tasty as the refreshing mint of those striped canes.