Christmas Books

Have you seen the wonderful Christmas booklists that have been coming out weekly on our homepage. There is every kind of book from murder mysteries to books with Christmas humor. Each time I look I found a book I want to read.

I just finished John Grishams "Skipping Christmas." Luther and Nora Krank are fed up with the chaos of Christmas. The endless shopping lists, the frenzied dashes through the mall, the hassle of decorating the tree... where has all the joy gone? This year, celebrating seems like too much effort. With their only child off in Peru, they decide that just this once, they'll skip the holidays. They spend their Christmas budget on a Caribbean cruise set to sail on December 25, and happily settle in for a restful holiday season free of rooftop snowmen and festive parties.But the Kranks soon learn that their vacation from Christmas isn't much of a vacation at all, and that skipping the holidays has consequences they didn't bargain for...A modern Christmas classic, Skipping Christmas is a charming and hilarious look at the mayhem and madness that have become ingrained in our holiday tradition. It was a fun read, however, not Grisham's best work.

"Deck the Halls with Murder" by Valerie Wolzien is a great little murder mystery that happens at Christmas time. Building contractor Josie Pigeon and her all-woman construction crew have a big project to wrap up before the holidays--and they're hard at work when carpenter Caroline Albrecht keels over, fatally poisoned. Suddenly an icy wind of suspicion chills the cheer of this quiet island resort town, and Josie realizes that one of her employees must be Caroline's murderer. Is it Caroline's old friend Layne? Sandy, who scarcely knew her? . . . or good-time local girl Betty? It will take Josie's razor-sharp eye and smart sleuthing to single out the suspect and keep Christmas from turning into a real killer of a season.

"Corpus Christmas" by Margaret Maron is the new one I picked up this morning. A relic of Manhattan's Gilded Age, when Edith Wharton and Henry James chronicled its inhabitants, the Erich Bruel House on Gramercy Park contained three floors of glorious art-and one Christmas corpse. While the mansion was being decorated with antique ornaments, and preparations were being made for a lavish holiday party, someone killed the obnoxious art historian Dr. Roger Shambley.Lieutenant Sigrid Harald of the New York Police Department comes up with a long list of suspects, and must sort through all sorts of motives, including academic rivalry, infidelity, art fraud, and good old-fashioned spite. Unless Sigrid can wrap up this homicide before the killer strikes again, her romantic white Christmas is going to be splashed with crimson. One of the pleasures of Corpus Christmas is its well-drawn cast of art-world characters, as colorful a bunch of pompous types as ever enlivened a Daumier caricature.

Check out the bibliographies on our webpage and have some fun reading in front of the Christmas tree.

sue