aunt_agatha 
Get your Christmas read on by browsing through our selection of very gently used titles, assorted hardcovers, trade paperbacks and mass markets, This is the time of year to cozy up in front of the fire with a holiday book in hand. Just click on the online store tab and go to the store page. Happy reading!
Clea Simon’s cozies have a bit of extra edge and sparkle to them, and have ranged from a pet psychic to a rescue cat narrator in a long career spanning several series. In this latest outing, the cats are again front and center, and this time they are witch cats. They’ve confused their owner, Becca, who is a fledgling member of a coven – one of them made a pillow appear out of thin air and Becca thinks she’s done it herself, as does the rest of her coven.
The cats are a little disgusted by this but the three of them – adopted by Becca – have a mission to protect and care for her and their powers are many and varied. They range from the very real cat talent of comforting their owners to the talents of making things appear, controlling thoughts, and walking through walls, the better to track Becca undetected.
Black and White Ball, Loren D. Estleman, Deep into a now 80 book and counting career, and 27 in to his iconic Amos Walker series, what is Loren Estleman going to come up with that might be new? You might be surprised. In this novel Walker crosses paths with one of Estleman’s other characters, Peter Macklin, who hires Walker to look after his ex-wife. The meet up of these two classic characters delivers true energy and snap to this tight, well written novel. Paced perfectly, set in a gritty yet realistic Detroit, and sporting the truly lovely prose and incredible dialogue that are an Estleman trademark, this is a great addition to a classic series by the greatest private eye writer at work at the moment.
This is one of the best selling books through our years as an open store. A true account of the murders that took place in Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor between 1967-69, and the story of how the killer was caught. This is a used copy with spine creases and a stain on the bottom edge, but still perfectly readable. $5.50.
Three books into her series about Detective Gemma Monroe, I am already so smitten that this series belongs alongside favorite series of mine by Sarah Stewart Taylor, Elly Griffiths, Ellen Hart and Julia Spencer-Fleming. All of these writers – including Littlejohn – create a rich setting, and populate their unique settings or occupations with even richer characters and stories. All of them feature extremely strong women as their core characters.
Gemma lives in a smallish Colorado Mountain town – but still big enough to have some skiing and some cultural life – and her life is complicated. Like a real person’s life is complicated. She has beloved grandparents who raised her, but her grandmother suffers from dementia; she has a baby she loves and is engaged to the baby’s father, but she’s conflicted about him because of a past affair; and her relationship with her partner, Finn, can be prickly. Oh, and the police department is dealing with a leaker.
The third in Candace Robb’s Kate Clifford series, set in 1400 York, finds much has changed in Kate’s world. Kate, a widow who had been shackled by her late husband’s debts, has at last paid them off. She’s a happy mother to her wards – two of them her late husband’s illegitimate children – but she loves all three of her children, one of them saved from the streets of York, equally. Her household is a bustling and happy one.
As the book opens, a friend appears of her doorstep in a snowstorm, requesting shelter. Kate unthinkingly takes her in and only on reflection realizes the danger of taking in a woman who may be regarded at the worst as a traitor, at the least as a fugitive and corpse thief. The woman, Lady Kirkby, has witnessed the beheading of her husband during an uprising in nearby Cirencester.
This first novel can almost be slotted into a new subgenre – “dog lit.” It joins excellent books by Margaret Mizushima and Robert Crais in featuring working dogs (this one ex-military) who have a damaged human partner. (There’s another one in the works from well known dog lover Owen Laukkanen.) Like Mizushima’s novels, this one has a wonderful feel for setting, in this case, the Vermont woods.
The main character, Mercy Carr, is back from Afghanistan with her partner’s dog, Elvis. Both are mourning the loss of Mercy’s partner, Martinez, and woman and dog are walking the woods together, trying to move past PTSD and become more of a unit. As the book opens they are out in the woods and Elvis finds a baby in a carrier with no mother in sight.
While I was hesitant to pick up this novel – Truss is best known for her grammar book Eats, Shoots and Leaves – I was smitten by her introduction where she confessed her goal of becoming a member of the Detection Club. After reading that, I was all in, and the book took me the rest of the way on its own. This is the kind of funny, dry, intelligent humor the Brits do so well, and the set up is delicious.
The novel is set in Brighton in 1957, and makes frequent reference to Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, a classic novel about gangs. Truss’s Brighton, while also beset by gangs, is a slightly less ominous place. The story opens as Inspector Steine is greeted by a new and enthusiastic recruit, Constable Twitten. Steine is pretty oblivious and only interested in resting on his past laurels – where two rival gangs took themselves out under his watch – he now insists, Stalin-like, that there is no more crime in Brighton.
The third in a series about small town police chief Thomas Lynch, Gayle’s novel manages to be both charming and a straight up police procedural. It’s set apart a bit from the norm (and I haven’t read the other two in the series, Idyll Threats and Idyll Fears), so I don’t know if the same parameters apply in the other two novels, but the narrators switch back and forth between chapters.
While the central character, as proclaimed on the cover, is Chief Tom Lynch, the other central character, a far as this novel goes, is Detective Michael Finnegan. The story involves a cold case involving a human bone found in the woods 20 plus years ago; the case and the bone are affectionately known as “Colleen” and a local ghost story has sprung up around her. When the rest of her bones are discovered early on, the detectives begin their hunt for the real Colleen.
All good writers have themes they like to re-explore and think through in many of their books. In Kingdom of the Blind Louise Penny returns to a theme that has long been of interest to her, that of the unreliability of mere appearances. The pleasant facade masking rot within. As she focuses thematically on the yin and yang of her characters and thoughts – at one point, Gamache thinks to himself “that conversation had gone both well and badly. Was comforting and nauseating. Successful and humiliating”, she forces the reader to examine his or her own preconceptions.
