The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year (Carter)

The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year
Ally Carter (2024)

(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)

This was a Pandemic Book Club book. It came available from the library about 3 days after I finally bought a copy of it. As it was, I didn't finish it in time for the book club meeting, but that was pushed back a week, so I haven't missed it yet. I'll update with reactions.

The book deconstructs mystery writing when a writer and her "nemesis" are suddenly invited to an event for Christmas and flown to England without a clue where they are going. Maggie Chase is a successful writer who has a horrible life -- her ex-husband now lives in the house she paid for with her ex-best friend, and Christmastime is filled with nothing but bad memories. Worse, she can't stand Ethan Wyatt, the Leather Jacket Guy author who is a relative newcomer and a bit of a rival.

Working on my assumptions, this is practically made for a Hallmark Christmas movie. (Not surprisingly, the author has written at least one of those.) It's a rom-com and a mystery as the two of them come together, partly out of self-preservation, and partly because they unravel their interwined past and start to understand what was going on back then.

The trip brings them to the estate of a reclusive fan, Eleanor Ashley, the Duchess of Death, author of 99 best-selling novels, with rumors about number 100. She's in her 80s now, but that still means that she'd been churning them out for quite a while. Maggie (not Marcie, now) is her biggest fan. Ethan acts like he doesn't know he she is but also turns out to be a fan, having read the books with his mother before she walked out on the family.

There's a cast of characters, like someone assembled in Clue or Murder by Death, mostly relatives of some sort, along with another writer, the butler, and a police inspectror.




If you stumbled across my page via the Internet, please check out my short book series, Burke Lore Briefs.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

1632 (or The Ring of Fire) (Flint)

Image
1632 (or The Ring of Fire) , by Eric Flint, 2000 In the year 2000, a freak occurrence, referred to as The Ring of Fire , sent the town of Grantsville, Virginia back through time and space, swapping places with a plot of land in central Germany in 1632, in the middle of the Thirty Years War. The small mining town quickly realizes the unlikeliness of a second cataclysm putting right what had been torn apart and sets out to acclimate to their way of life. And, of course, survive. Their weapons and technology give them a great advantage, but they no longer have the industry to produce that technology. Nor do the have the industry to produce the industry ... An alternate timeline is born as the United States of America is founded 144 years early (and on a different continent). History plays on around them. The book divides its time between brutal battles fought across Germany, building a new society and some overlong passages on just how well the Americans are getting along with thei...
Read more

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Halloween Rain (Golden, Holder)

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Halloween Rain, Golden, Holder, 1997 An episode of the show which I hadn't seen. Killer scarecrow that comes alive during the rains on Halloween. Samhain can see through the eyes of any pumpkin and move if it's on a scarecrow. Quick read. Should've been quicker. Mind candy. There's a line that I left out that says, "Cute line about coupe....", except that I can't read my own handwriting, nor remember what the cute line was actually about. I'm also not sure if this was actually an episode, or if it was my belief at the time that it was based on one particular episode and not based on the characters from the series. Ultimately, it was forgettable.
Read more

Two Short Books

Image
Big Bullet Monster Bomb: lost little things: a short story for mature readers by Adam Archer (2020) The Race by John Russo (2021) (Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.) I don't remember where I found these stories. I don't think it was reddit. It could've been on Facebook or Twitter. Nothing about the Bullet Bomb book was particularly geared toward mature readers, other than the cover showing a woman wearing rags that barely cover what they need to. It seems like a story set in a larger world that I haven't read but I have no idea of this is the case. It's post-apocalyptic and the last of the human race is slowly morphing into cratures. This much is interesting. The main character is pulling a sled of her belongings (including guns) and looking for some place to hide so she can sleep. Her sleep c...
Read more