EQMM, January 2010 by Dell Magazine Authors

Author:Dell Magazine Authors
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dell Magazines

Reviews: THE JURY BOX by Jon L. Breen

Once, Christmas mysteries were relatively rare, but in today's commercially driven market we get a slew of them annually. (My own contribution is the Big Trial comedy Probable Claus [Five Star, $25.95].) Some writers have become specialists in the subgenre: Mary Higgins Clark and Carol Higgins Clark have collaborated on several novellas, and Steve Hockensmith has done various seasonal stories for EQMM. Another holiday specialist is longtime EQMM fixture James Powell, whose A Pocketful of Noses: Stories of One Ganelon or Another (Crippen & Landru, $42 signed limited hardcover, $17 trade paper) gathers a dozen stories from these pages about four sleuthing generations in the fictional European principality San Sebastiano. Among them is one of the most chilling and unforgettable Christmas ghost stories you'll ever read: “Harps of Gold,” in which opposing World War I leaders want to be certain that the previous year's unseemly fraternization with the enemy is not repeated on December 24, 1916.

*** Anne Perry: A Christmas Promise, Ballantine, $18. In each annual holiday novella, Perry focuses on a different secondary character from one of her Victorian series, in this case Gracie Phipps, thirteen years old in 1883, a few years before becoming a servant to London cop Thomas Pitt and wife Charlotte. Gracie helps a younger East End child, whose uncle, a rag-and-bone man, has died suspiciously, his donkey and cart disappeared. First-rate description and atmosphere, neat plot, and inspirational denouement mark this one of the best in the series, with one drawback: the Zane Grey method of rendering dialect phonetically makes it harder to read. It's even more bothersome when nearly all the characters are Cockneys.

*** John Mortimer: A Rumpole Christmas, Viking, $21.95. Most of the five stories in this slim collection about barrister Horace Rumpole saw first U.S. publication in the Strand magazine. Only “Old Familiar Faces,” which appeared in Rumpole Rests His Case (2002), has previously been collected. “Slimmed-Down Christmas” is one of the purest detective puzzles in the saga. “Christmas Break,” in which a Muslim university student is accused of the murder of a professor, has some similarities to the novel Rumpole and the Reign of Terror (2006), though this time it is the unpleasant Judge Graves with whom She Who Must Be Obeyed gets chummy. With the passing of the irreplaceable Mortimer, the following may be the final in-print stats on Rumpole: sixteen volumes, including four novels and seventy-five short stories.

*** Kaitlyn Dunnett: A Wee Christmas Homicide, Kensington, $22. Liss MacCrimmon's Scottish Emporium and a couple of other Moosetookalook, Maine, merchants are the only New England retailers that still have the holiday-hot Tiny Teddies in stock. The success of Liss's plan to help the town's economy with a twelve-days-of-Christmas promotion depends on the trendy toy remaining available. Mischief and murder follow in a neatly written and plotted mystery with an intriguing afterword about Scottish yuletide customs. (Dunnett is the pseudonym of historical specialist Kathy Lynn Emerson.)

*** Jeff Markowitz: It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Murder, Five Star, $25.

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