Owl Be Home for Christmas (A Very Murder Christmas #2)
by Rosie A. Pointe
Blurb:
With six days to go before Christmas, there’s only one thing on everyone’s minds… Murder!Holly, local dog walker and amateur sleuth extraordinaire, likes to think she’s her hometown’s answer to the dog whisperer. But owls? That’s another sack of feathers all together. When she’s called out to a rich woman’s home, Holly is shocked when she’s asked to… walk an owl?No amount of explaining will convince her new client that walking birds is something Holly can’t do. Or that owls are nocturnal creatures. Just when Holly’s ready to give up and go home, her client clasps at her throat, chokes, and keels over. Dead as a doornail.Holly’s got no idea what happened to her, but with the local Christmas celebrations under threat, she won’t stop until she’s solved the crime.
My Reaction:
I read this tiny novel together with Donald, because (as you may have guessed) it was the annual 372 Pages We'll Never Get Back cozy mystery selection. It's a tradition now for the podcast to cover a (usually Christmas-themed) cozy mystery sometime around/between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Far from completists, Mike and Conor typically just dip into the middle of series for their cozy mystery reads, and this time was no different. It's the second in a series of three books (so far).
Given the nature of the podcast, you wouldn't expect this to be a particularly (objectively) "great" book, and you'd be right. In my very limited experience of reading cozy mysteries, I find them typically thin on the mystery, but this was an extreme example of that. There's very little actual investigation, and when you reach the end, there are some big questions left hanging. (Like how in the heck someone who is deathly allergic to cherries could eat a cake without noticing the cherries stuck inside—after baking and icing/decorating—without seeing... that it's been tampered with... and that there are whole pieces of cherries... in the cake she's eating in broad daylight... I just... Look, why didn't the author go for cherry liqueur or cherry juice or something?! It's insane!)
Anyway!
I found this less fun to read than the other cozy mysteries we've read for the podcast, but I guess they can't all be The Quilters Push Back. Listening along with the podcast makes it worth reading, but otherwise, I wouldn't bother.
