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Monday, December 19, 2016

The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries (Vintage Crime Original)

"The most complete collection of Yuletide whodunits ever assembled," is how this 650-page omnibus describes itself. I believe I blogged very briefly about this collection several years ago. Each year now I read a number of stories.

My favorite before this year's reading was Mary Roberts Rinehart's "The Butler's Christmas Eve." This year I have a new favorite written by the English writer Gillian Linscott. "A Scandal in Winter" is set during the Christmas holidays at a mountain resort in Switzerland in the first decade of the 1900s. Linscott is probably best known as the author of the Nell Bray detective stories. Linscott has also been noted as an impassioned fan of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries. "Scandal in Winter" has been widely anthologized, and rightly so. It is a very entertaining and humorous  Holmesian story, which pivots around the eyewitness account of a naïve 13-year-old girl. Absolutely charming!

I highly recommend this comprehensive volume because it holds many Christmases' worth of holiday mysteries.


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