5 mystery novels to cozy up with this holiday season
The holidays are a perfect time to cozy up with a good mystery novel, and this season offers a wonderful variety of whodunits starring beloved detectives as well as new characters you will want to get to know.
“Against the Grain”:
Peter Lovesey concludes his award-winning Peter Diamond series with a classic English-village mystery. Warily facing his looming retirement, Diamond reluctantly heads from his home in Bath to the countryside for a brief holiday to visit his former colleague Julie Hargreaves. But Hargreaves has a hidden agenda: She believes that local police in the idyllic village of Baskerville have accused the wrong person in a murder case, and she wants Diamond to unofficially snoop around, which naturally gets him in deeper than he anticipated.
“The Author’s Guide to Murder”: Never mind that the plot is a bit scatterbrained, the story is a tad long, and there’s way too much plaid involved, this murder mystery spoof is just plain fun to read. Co-written by three veteran authors, the story revolves around – you guessed it – three authors who head off together to a writers retreat at a haunted Scottish castle on a windswept island. The retreat is a just a ruse, though. The three writers actually are on a mission to humiliate the retreat sponsor, best-selling author Brett Saffron Presley, as he had humiliated each of them. When Presley suddenly turns up dead, however, the three revenge-seekers become the prime suspects and must find the real killer to save themselves.
“The Case of the Missing Maid”: It’s 1898, and Harriet Morrow can’t believe her luck in landing a job as the first female detective at the prestigious Prescott Agency in Chicago. Assigned to find Agnes Wozniak, the missing live-in maid employed by a wealthy neighbor of her boss, Morrow follows clues that take her into the heart of the city’s Polish community and also lead her to places where LGBTQ folks like herself secretly gather. As she gets closer to the truth of what happened to Wozniak, Morrow must depend on her wits and courage – as well as her newly minted shooting skills – to solve the case.
“Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret”: Benjamin Stevenson brings his trademark mix of laughs and cleverness to the holiday season in this delightful third volume of the best-selling Everyone series. Framing his locked-room mystery around an Advent calendar, Stevenson details what happens when narrator and Golden Age mystery buff Ernest Cunningham is drawn into another case after his ex-wife, Erin, is charged with killing her new partner. Despite the seemingly overwhelming evidence against her, Cunningham is convinced of Erin’s innocence, and sets out to prove it, overcoming a raft of complications that include people trying to kill him.
“Echo”: Chicago Police Detective Harriet “Harri” Foster has a cause célèbre on her hands: The body of Brice Collier, son of billionaire Sebastian Collier, is found in a field near the campus of the college he attended. Things get worse when Foster learns that the murder echoes one decades ago involving the elder Collier. Meanwhile, Foster is dealing with some major issues of her own, as she fends off a stalker and grapples with the death of her former police partner. “Echo” is the third in Clark’s series focused on Foster, but it stands firmly on its own.
Karen MacPherson is the former children’s and teen coordinator at the Takoma Park Maryland Library and a lifelong mystery fan.