Owl Be Home for Christmas

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. 

The September House

The September House

by Carissa Orlando

Blurb:

A woman is determined to stay in her dream home even after it becomes a haunted nightmare in this compulsively readable, twisty, and layered debut novel.

When Margaret and her husband Hal bought the large Victorian house on Hawthorn Street—for sale at a surprisingly reasonable price—they couldn’t believe they finally had a home of their own. Then they discovered the hauntings. Every September, the walls drip blood. The ghosts of former inhabitants appear, and all of them are terrified of something that lurks in the basement. Most people would flee.

Margaret is not most people.

Margaret is staying. It’s her house. But after four years Hal can’t take it anymore, and he leaves abruptly. Now, he’s not returning calls, and their daughter Katherine—who knows nothing about the hauntings—arrives, intent on looking for her missing father. To make things worse, September has just begun, and with every attempt Margaret and Katherine make at finding Hal, the hauntings grow more harrowing, because there are some secrets the house needs to keep.

My Reaction:

I chose to read this knowing only that it was recommended by someone, somewhere, to people who want to read books about haunted houses.  (Or at least that's all I remembered by the time I got around to reading it!)  Right off the bat, I was intrigued. It obviously wasn't your typical horror novel.  In fact, I'd describe this as "cozy horror", because it felt like a mash-up of rather gory horror and cozy mystery.  It wasn't what I expected, based on the cover, but it was interesting.  

Unfortunately, I found the book fell a bit flat for me.  I don't regret reading it, but it wasn't completely satisfying.  I'll discuss why below, because there will be spoilers.  Final verdict: Not my ideal ghost story style, but if you're up for something different, it's definitely that!  

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Okay.  Reasons I didn't fully enjoy this book:

Katherine is extremely bratty and annoying.  Couldn't stand her, to be honest. 

The cursing really annoyed me.  There was so much of it, and I found it so unnecessary.  

The gore isn't for me.  I dislike gory stuff, though I found that when the gore really ratcheted up, it was more boring than anything else.  Gore in movies and TV shows bothers me more because of all the sounds and, well, the visuals, but when I'm reading and it's just one gory thing after another, I find my mind shuts off and I skip over it.  I don't get anything from it, so why read it?  I'm not the best, these days, at visualizing things from books, anyway—more of a dialogue person, I guess—but when it's something I don't even want to imagine, why bother?  But yeah, that's another strike against the book for me. Not a fan of gore.  Give me eeriness, psychological horror, and a creepy atmosphere instead, please. 

The domestic abuse angle... I don't know, I guess it was there for a reason, but I felt it didn't pay off as much as expected.  

It was completely predictable that Hal would be discovered in the basement. 

The grand finale, final battle, or whatever you want to call it was oddly anticlimactic.  That was the part where I just started skimming—because, okay, I get it, the ghosts are all banding together and tearing Master Vale apart, and it's really disgusting and brutal and... yawn.  Once it's clear where this is all heading, I don't need the play-by-play.  Let's just get to the next part of the story.  So I found it boring, but worse, it just didn't make a lot of sense to me.  If all it took to vanquish Master Vale was for the other ghosts to band together, I don't understand why it took them so long to do it.  It doesn't make sense to me that it was so easy—or if it was so easy, why no-one else had done it already.  Yeah, Margaret was defending her daughter, like she (finally) defended her from Hal.  ...Okay?  I don't know what else to say, but it was not a satisfying ending, and I feel the book didn't give satisfying explanations for the ghosts' stories, either.  Not sure what I wanted, but not this. 

The positives?  
I really liked the housekeeper ghost.  The idea of a ghost who makes you supper and offers friendly chit-chat was oddly appealing to me.

The Quilting Cruise

The Quilting Cruise (Miranda Hathaway Adventures #9)

by Mary Devlin Lynch and Beth Devlin-Keune

Blurb:

A cruise for quilters? Who could have thought of such a thing? Not Miranda Hathaway. It combined her favorite hobby with her greatest fear. She was terrified of open water, well, of drowning. But, of course, her BFF Diane talks her into going with the rest of Cutler Quilt Guild #1 and, true to form, she finds herself embroiled in a mystery that involves a quilt instructor and her very dark and shady husband. They have one week to find the truth. Will they? And at what cost?

My Reaction:

Another 372-Pages book, read with Donald.  

This one felt less fun than the other in the same series that the podcast previously covered, but it still had its moments!

Doggone Christmas

Doggone Christmas (Polly Parrett Petsitter #1)

by Liz Dodwell

Blurb:

Polly is juggling the care of her wheelchair-bound mother, her pet-sitting business and the sale of the family home. On top of that she finds herself having to deal with an arrogant but really sexy realtor, and Christmas is coming! None of that seems important, though, when she finds herself in the middle of a murder investigation and must find the real killer before an innocent homeless man and his dog are wrongly convicted.

My Reaction:

Donald and I needed something to fill the gap between 372-Pages books, and it was still in the Christmas-y time of year, so we decided to read another "Christmas cozy" from the podcast's shortlist of cozy mysteries.  We went through the ones not selected this time around and chose one that was available to us for free.  

Well, all I can say is that I think it's a good thing they chose the book they did instead of this one.  I'm sure they could have found things to talk about, but this felt much more like a standard cozy mystery to both of us, compared to the one they ended up choosing.  It's very much what you expect from a cozy mystery.

I've forgotten most of the things that stuck out, but I do recall deciding that the author must be British, because a few words/turns of phrase stuck out to us as not sounding authentically American—someone was described as being "in hospital", for instance.  Just a point of interest!

A Killer Christmas Affair: A Cozy Mystery

A Killer Christmas Affair: A Cozy Mystery

by Sussie Jordan

Blurb:

The Christmas party is in full swing as Darbie and Marisol show off their new business venture, Sunflower Hacienda, as a magnificent Mexican style resort on Lake Travis, when suddenly, Santa is found dead. The Sheriff announces it was an accident. Now it’s up to Darbie and Marisol, with the help of their loveable Saint Berdoodle, to find the killer before anyone else gets hurt and to save their business! Who would want Santa dead?

My Reaction:
Oof, I don't know how to rate this one...!  It's another 372-Pages selection—this year's cozy mystery for the lead-up to Christmas.  It's not uncommon for books featured on this book club podcast to be a bit challenging to rate:  Sometimes I'll rate one highly simply because it was unintentionally hilarious and therefore fun to read.  Other times, my rating more closely aligns with my opinion of the book's... quality (or lack thereof).  This time, there's an extra complication in the fact that so much of the story seems to have been "borrowed" (lifted directly) from another book (one that guides would-be cozy authors through the process of writing Christmas cozy mysteries).  

Well, I can heartily recommend the episodes of the podcast about this book.  The book itself needs a lot of work, to be honest.  I wasn't expecting much complexity, given how short the book is, but there is barely any investigation at all before the guilty party goes nuts and brings everything to a too-hasty conclusion.  Not a satisfying resolution to the mystery, though I have to admit there were some funny bits to enjoy before the precipitous ending.