Holiday Books
Ngaio Marsh: Off With His Head (Death of a Fool)
Festive Tasks Master Update Post HERE Festive Tasks, Door 19 — Community Traditions & Folklore: Read a fairy tale, or folklore story, or books based on either. Marsh’s third (de facto) holiday mystery, though not exactly set on Christmas but on and around Winter Solstice — because here her focus is on creating (with […]
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Two Christmas Mystery Short Story Anthologies
Festive Tasks Master Update Post HERE Festive Tasks, Door 21 — Good Luck Charms and Traditions: Read a book from the fantasy genre, or one with something on the cover that refers to “luck”. Festive Tasks, Door 24 — Cherished Memories: Read a book with a split timeline, one that takes place in the present […]
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Amy Pershing: An Eggnog to Die For
Festive Tasks Master Update Post HERE Festive Tasks, Door 17 — Food & Drink: Read a book about food, or where the main character is a chef, gourmand, or bartender, brewer or distiller. Sigh. I think it’s fair to say at this point that food-related cozy mysteries aren’t necessary my kind of thing, at […]
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Ngaio Marsh: Death and the Dancing Footman
Festive Tasks Master Update Post HERE Festive Tasks, Door 15 — Correspondence: Read a book that includes a billionaire, a villain, or some other character who is especially smug or pretentious. This isn’t strictly a Christmas mystery — the holiday never gets an express mention — but it has all the trappings of a […]
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Charles Dickens: A Christmas Carol
Festive Tasks Master Update Post HERE Festive Tasks, Door 16 — Charity: Read “A Christmas Carol,” or read a book in which poverty or hardship are significant plot elements. This is one of my annual Christmas rereads; one of the books I’ll never get tired of — in addition to listening to the audiobook […]
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Anthony Berkeley: The Wintringham Mystery
Festive Tasks Master Update Post HERE Festive Tasks, Door 23 — Personal Traditions: Read a book that involves big changes for the main character. This is relatively early book by Berkeley based on a premise that, if I hadn’t found it in a novel actually published in the interwar era, I’d have declared flat-out […]
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Karen Baugh Menuhin: Murder at Melrose Court
Festive Tasks Master Update Post HERE Door 12 — Northern Hemisphere: Read something with snow or ice on the cover or read a ghost story. I read the second book of this series, The Black Cat Murders, as my (you guessed it) “Black Cat” square book for this year’s Halloween Bingo, and while there […]
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Moray Dalton: The Night of Fear – Buddy (Re)Read
After a late start into this buddy read (and a first evening where I was too wiped out to reread more than the two introductions and the first 15 pages), I ended up essentially whipping through the whole book in two installments of roughly two hours each. I found that I still remembered virtually everything […]
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Festive Tasks: Door 2, Task 1 – The Spirit of Christmas Perpetual
Festive Tasks Master Update Post HERE Task 1: Holiday books often have covers that try to evoke a certain emotion in the reader. Post a picture, or a gallery of pictures, of holiday themed book covers that really appeal to you, and, if you want to, tell us why. A large part of what I […]
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Festive Tasks: Door 2, Task 4 – Six Degrees of Literation
Master Update Post HERE Task 4: Let’s play Six Degrees of Literation! Start with the book that you are reading right now and make a chain of six books, linked in however you want to link them, to one of the classic holiday reads mentioned in this Guardian article. My brain started going into nonstop […]
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Ngaio Marsh: Off With His Head (aka Death of a Fool)
24 Festive Tasks: Door 10 – First Day of Carnival, Book: Read a book about starting over, rebuilding, new beginnings, etc., or a book where things go “BOOM!”, or with fireworks on the cover. I decided on a minor Ngaio Marsh mini binge, following up Tied up in Tinsel (my NYE book) with another one […]
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Ngaio Marsh: Death and the Dancing Footman
24 Festive Tasks: Door 1 – Día de los Muertos / All Saints’ Day, Book: Reread a favorite book by a deceased author or from a finished series, or read a book set in Mexico or a book that either has a primarily black and white cover or all the colors (ROYGBIV) on the cover, […]
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Ngaio Marsh: Five Assorted Roderick Alleyn Mysteries
A five-volume foray into Ngaio Marsh’s Roderick Alleyn series: next to Agatha Christie’s, Dorothy Sayers’s, Margery Allingham’s and Patricia Wentworth’s one of the major Great Detective series of the Golden Age; taken together, these five writers are unquestionably the era’s “Queens of Crime.” (I own print versions of all of Marsh’s novels, too, and pulled […]
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