YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE, NO MATTER WHERE YOU LIVE.
If your New Year’s resolution for 2024 is to follow the authors who appear at The Poisoned Pen, here’s a reminder. It’s easy to follow the schedule of appearances, and check the Webstore for books by the authors. https://store.poisonedpen.com/
Here’s the schedule of events for the first couple weeks of 2024.
Happy Holidays from The Poisoned Pen!
This week’s Hot Book of the Week at The Poisoned Pen is a murder mystery, The Christmas Jigsaw Murders. You can order a copy through the Webstore. https://bit.ly/3tsNZLl
Here’s the description of The Christmas Jigsaw Murders.
HIS CHRISTMAS, A KILLER TAKES FAMILY GAMES TO A MURDEROUS NEW LEVEL.On 1st of December, renowned puzzle setter, loner and Christmas sceptic Carla Murphy finds a hand-delivered present on her doorstep. Unwrapping it, she finds a jigsaw box with a question mark on the lid, and, inside, six jigsaw pieces. When fitted together, the pieces show part of a crime scene – blood-spattered black and white tiles and part of an outlined body. On the back of the pieces is a ‘His death takes place on the solstice, unless you can put together the pieces,’ along with a clue to the location of more pieces. When the police say there isn’t anything to investigate, Carla teams up with her Christmas-loving nephew, PC Simon Reynard, to solve the clues, find the jigsaw pieces and prevent the murder. Each set of jigsaw pieces leads to the next, but the more Carla finds, the more she discovers that the mystery is far more connected to her past than it first appeared, and to a Christmas mystery she’s being trying to forget for a very long time. Only by fitting all the pieces together will Carla find the peace and goodwill she’s secretly always been looking for.
It’s really that time of year when I don’t have any news to post on the blog. So, from The Poisoned Pen, here are the holiday hours.
Holiday Store Hours: M-F 10 AM-7 PM Sat 10 AM-6 PM
Sun 12-5 PM
Closed at 5 PM December 24 and 31
Closed all day December 25 and January 1 & 2
What does a blogger do when author appearances end for the holidays, and won’t resume until January? Since I’m in Ohio, and not in Arizona, I don’t often do events for The Poisoned Pen. That doesn’t mean I’m going to “overlook” a book I appreciated this year. It’s too late for you to get it for the holidays because it has to be special ordered, but a few of you might find this one as intriguing as I do.
Overlooked: A Celebration of Remarkable, Underappreciated People Who Broke the Rules and Changed the World is by Amisha Padnanti and the Obituaries Desk of The New York Times. It can be ordered through the Webstore. https://bit.ly/4aB9sCH
Here’s my description of the book.
When Padnani joined the obituaries team at The New York Times as an editor in 2016, she questioned the obituaries that never appeared. “Where were the women, the people of color, and the LGBTQ and disabled communities who made history?’ Padnani and the team delved into the archives, and uncovered surprises. The New York Times never ran an obituary for Sylvia Plath. Of course, there are so many women scientists whose obituaries went unpublished, their contributions ignored. In 2018, the newspaper began to run “Overlooked”, a history series that tells the stories of those people whose obituaries didn’t run in the paper, although they deserved recognition.
I was totally captivated by this book, and read every story. But, there were also some small bits that added to the book. At the end of each section, there was a sidebar. One covered “The Evolution of Obituaries”. One was about the newspaper’s morgue. In addition, each obituary is signed and there’s a couple sentences about the author of that piece, sentences that give enough detail to show why the author wrote about the deceased, why they were interested in their subject.
Of course, I found some pieces more interesting that others. Emma Gatewood was the first woman to walk the Appalachian Trail alone, but she had already survived so much in her life. Margaret Gipsy Moth was a CNN camera operator who spent much of her career in war zones. Some of us who were fans of the group The Monkees remember that Mike Nesmith’s mother, Bette Nesmith Graham, invented Liquid Paper. Of course, I found Alan Turing’s obituary interesting. It’s hard to believe the newspaper didn’t publish his obituary. And, I already mentioned Syliva Plath.
Fascinating stories and photos. If you enjoy a brief glimpse into history, or are intrigued by obituaries, as I am, you might want to pick up Overlooked.
Jess Armstrong’s debut mystery, The Curse of Penryth Hall, is the Hot Book of the Week at The Poisoned Pen. There are signed copies available in the Webstore. https://bit.ly/3GCSIx5
Here’s the description of The Curse of Penryth Hall.
An atmospheric gothic mystery that beautifully brings the ancient Cornish countryside to life, Armstrong introduces heroine Ruby Vaughn in her Minotaur Books & Mystery Writers of America First Crime Novel Award-winning debut, The Curse of Penryth Hall.
After the Great War, American heiress Ruby Vaughn made a life for herself running a rare bookstore alongside her octogenarian employer and house mate in Exeter. She’s always avoided dwelling on the past, even before the war, but it always has a way of finding her. When Ruby is forced to deliver a box of books to a folk healer living deep in the Cornish countryside, she is brought back to the one place she swore she’d never return. A more sensible soul would have delivered the package and left without rehashing old wounds. But no one has ever accused Ruby of being sensible. Thus begins her visit to Penryth Hall.
A foreboding fortress, Penryth Hall is home to Ruby’s once dearest friend, Tamsyn, and her husband, Sir Edward Chenowyth. It’s an unsettling place, and after a more unsettling evening, Ruby is eager to depart. But her plans change when Penryth’s bells ring for the first time in thirty years. Edward is dead; he met a gruesome end in the orchard, and with his death brings whispers of a returned curse. It also brings Ruan Kivell, the person whose books brought her to Cornwall, the one the locals call a Pellar, the man they believe can break the curse. Ruby doesn’t believe in curses—or Pellars—but this is Cornwall and to these villagers the curse is anything but lore, and they believe it will soon claim its next victim: Tamsyn.
To protect her friend, Ruby must work alongside the Pellar to find out what really happened in the orchard that night.
Jess Armstrong’s debut novel The Curse of Penryth Hall won the Mystery Writers of America/Minotaur First Crime Novel Competition. She has a masters degree in American History but prefers writing about imaginary people to the real thing. Jess lives in New Orleans with her historian husband, two sons, yellow cat, speckled dog, and the world’s most pampered school-fair goldfish. And when she’s not working on her next project, she’s probably thinking about cheese, baking, tweeting or some combination of the above. You can find her on Twitter at or see what’s new on her website.
The Hot Book of the Week at The Poisoned Pen is S.J. Rozan’s latest Lydia Chin/Bill Smith mystery, The Mayors of New York. You an order a signed copy through the Webstore. https://bit.ly/4ajlSi8
Here’s the description of The Mayors of New York.
The new crime novel from the award-winning S. J. Rozan, where private investigators Lydia Chin and Bill Smith find themselves thrust into the mystery behind the disappearance of the teenage son of the mayor of New York.
In January, New York City inaugurates its first female mayor. In April, her son disappears.
Called in by the mayor’s chief aide—a former girlfriend of private investigator Bill Smith’s—to find the missing fifteen-year-old, Bill and his partner, Lydia Chin, are told the boy has run away. Neither the press nor the NYPD know that he’s missing, and the mayor wants him back before a headstrong child turns into a political catastrophe. But as Bill and Lydia investigate, they turn up more questions than answers.
Why did the boy leave? Who else is searching for him, and why? What is his twin sister hiding?
Then a teen is found dead and another is hit by gunfire. Are these tragedies related to each other, and to the mayor’s missing son?
In a desperate attempt to find the answer to the boy’s disappearance before it’s too late, Bill and Lydia turn to the only contacts they think will be able to help: the neighborhood leaders who are the real ‘mayors’ of New York.
S. J. Rozan is the author of Family Business, The Art of Violence, Paper Son, and many other crime novels. She has won multiple awards for her fiction, including the Edgar, Shamus, Anthony, Nero, Macavity, the Japanese Maltese Falcon, and the Private Eye Writers of America Lifetime Achievement Award. S. J. was born and raised in the Bronx and now lives in lower Manhattan.
John Charles recently welcomed authors Paige Shelton, Kate Carlisle and Jenn McKinlay to The Poisoned Pen. Shelton’s latest book is Lost Hours. Carlisle’s is The Twelve Books of Christmas. McKinlay’s latest Cupcake Bakery mystery is Sugar Plum Poisoned. You can order signed copies through the Webstore.
Here’s the description of Lost Hours.
Lost Hours is the fifth instalment in Paige Shelton’s gripping, atmospheric Alaska Wild series.
A year after arriving in Benedict, Beth Rivers is feeling very at home in Alaska, even as outsiders are starting to return to enjoy the brief summer perfection. Beth feels like she’s finally let go of most of her demons. She’s even found her father, Eddy Rivers—or, rather, he found her—and she’s trying to find the middle ground between anger and forgiveness.
One sunny July day, Beth boards a tourist ship to see the glaciers, the main reason visitors venture to the area, and something Beth hasn’t attempted until now. But when the captain has to navigate to an island, a bloodied woman is found standing on the shore, waving for help. When she’s brought aboard, she claims she was kidnapped from her home in Juneau three days earlier, and that a bear on the island killed her captor. She, however, is unharmed.
The woman, Sadie, finds a sympathetic ear in Beth. She tells her that she’s been in Juneau under witness protection, and that the Juneau police don’t like her. When another kidnapping occurs, Beth and police chief Gril can’t help but think the two cases are interwoven, though the clues to solving them will be harder to unravel.
PAIGE SHELTON had a nomadic childhood, as her father’s job as a football coach took her family to seven different towns before she was even twelve years old. After college at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, she moved to Salt Lake City. She thought she’d only stay a couple years, but instead she fell in love with the mountains and a great guy who became her husband. After many decades in Utah, she and her family moved to Arizona. She writes the Scottish Bookshop Mystery series and the Alaska Wild series.Her other series include the Farmers’ Market, Cooking School, and Dangerous Type mystery series.
Kate Carlisle’s Bibliophile Mystery is The Twelve Books of Christmas.
The first ever Christmas mystery in the beloved New York Times bestselling Bibliophile Mystery series!
San Francisco book-restoration expert Brooklyn Wainwright and her hunky security-expert husband, Derek Stone, face a locked-room murder mystery during the holidays in Scotland.
In the middle of a wonderful Christmas holiday in Dharma, Brooklyn and Derek receive a frantic phone call from their dear friend Claire in Loch Ness, Scotland. The laird of the castle, Cameron MacKinnon, has just proposed to her! They plan to be married on New Year’s Day, and they want Derek and Brooklyn to be their witnesses. And while they’re visiting, Claire hopes that Brooklyn will be able to solve a little mystery that’s occurred in the castle library—twelve very rare, very important books have gone missing.
Once in Scotland, Brooklyn starts working on the mystery of the missing books but is soon distracted by all of the thumping and bumping noises she’s been hearing in the middle of the night. You’d think the Ghost of Christmas Past had taken up residence. But when one of the guests is poisoned and another is killed by an arrow through the heart, Brooklyn and Derek know this is not the work of any ghost. Now they must race to find a killer and a book thief before another murder occurs and their friends’ bright and happy future turns dark and deadly.
Kate Carlisle is the New York Times bestselling author of the Bibliophile Mysteries, including Little Black Book and The Grim Reader, as well as the Fixer-Upper Mysteries, including Absence of Mallets.
Sugar Plum Poisoned is the first Christmas mystery in the Cupcake Bakery series.
It’s Christmastime, and this holiday season, things are heating up for the bakers at Fairy Tale Cupcakes, in the newest Cupcake Bakery Mystery from New York Times bestselling author Jenn McKinlay.
When up-and-coming singing sensation Shelby Vaughn arrives in town for two weeks of concert dates, she hires her old friend Angie and the rest of the bakery crew to supply cupcakes for the VIP guest lounge every night.
After overhearing Shelby in a heated argument with her manager, Mel is concerned, but she and the crew decide to make the best of their time working with the star. Just as the bakers fall into the rhythm of the job, Shelby’s manager is found dead, clutching a bit of fabric from a Santa suit and a cupcake. With the bakery crew and Shelby’s backup dancers all dressed in similar Santa costumes, it’s impossible to say who is the killer. When all suspicions lead back to Shelby, Mel and Angie stand up for their friend, determined to prove her innocence before she’s frosted for a crime she didn’t commit.
Jenn McKinlay is the award-winning New York Times, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly bestselling author of several mystery and romance series. Her work has been translated into multiple languages in countries all over the world. She lives in sunny Arizona in a house that is overrun with kids, pets, and her husband’s guitars.
Enjoy the conversation with Paige Shelton, Kate Carlisle, and Jenn McKinlay.
John Charles of The Poisoned Pen always asks authors to introduce themselves before they were published. Jennifer Graeser Dornbush has an interesting backstory about her father, the medical examiner. Her background inspires her writing, including her new book, Last One Alive. It’s the third book in her Coroner’s Daughter Mystery series. Signed copies are available in the Webstore. https://tinyurl.com/4cyvrrde
Here’s the summary of Last One Alive.
Dr. Emily Hartford is back in Chicago, ready to move forward and leave the past behind, until an unexpected request for help sends her deep into an investigation—and into the path of a killer.
Seventeen months after the Parkman case, Dr. Hartford has returned to Chicago to finish her surgical residency. But when she is contacted out of the blue by Solange McClelland, the only survivor of a decade-old triple homicide, Emily is compelled to dig deeper. She doesn’t know the details of the event but remembers it as one of the few cases her deceased father never solved.
On her thirtieth birthday, Solange opens a long-forgotten safe-deposit box and is entirely baffled by what she finds. Inside are not only painful reminders of a once-happy youth but almost four million dollars—enough to pursue and finally solve the mystery of who brutally murdered her family. It’s been over ten years, and Solange has built a new life in Detroit with her husband, Joseph. But there are certain disturbing questions about her past that she is determined to answer. So she reaches out to the only one who might know something about her family’s deaths and their possibly erroneous death certificates—Dr. Hartford, the daughter of Freeport’s former medical examiner.
Finding it impossible to believe that her scrupulous father made a mistake, Emily joins Solange’s pursuit of the truth, and as subzero temperatures blanket snow-covered Michigan, the two women pursue justice in two very different ways. But lurking nearby in the frigid cold is a crafty, unrepentant killer, determined to finish what he started long ago.
Jennifer Graeser Dornbush is a screenwriter, author, international speaker, and forensic specialist. She is developing multiple projects for TV and film while also penning mysteries, thrillers, and short stories. Join her monthly newsletter at www.JenniferDornbush.com.
Enjoy Dornbush’s backstory and the backstory of her latest book.
Murder Crossed Her Mind is the fourth book in Stephen Spotswood’s Pentecost and Parker mystery series. Barbara Peters, owner of The Poisoned Pen, recently welcomed Spotswood to talk about his book. She said she thinks this is more a Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin adventure rather than a Sherlock Holmes/Dr. Watson book. You can check this out yourself by ordering a signed copy through the Webstore. https://bit.ly/3NhchOY
Here’s the summary of Murder Crossed Her Mind.
The New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • The latest action-packed installment in the Nero Award–winning Pentecost & Parker Mystery series follows Lillian and Will tracking the suspicious disappearance of a woman who might have known too much. From the author of Fortune Favors the Dead and Murder Under Her Skin.
Vera Bodine, an elderly shut-in with an exceptional memory, has gone missing and famed detective Lillian Pentecost and her crackerjack assistant Willowjean “Will” Parker have been hired to track her down. But the New York City of 1947 can be a dangerous place, and there’s no shortage of people who might like to get ahold of what’s in Bodine’s head.
Does her disappearance have to do with the high-profile law firm whose secrets she still keeps; the violent murder of a young woman, with which Bodine had lately become obsessed; or is it the work she did with the FBI hunting Nazi spies intent on wartime sabotage? Any and all are on the suspect list, including their client, Forest Whitsun, hotshot defense attorney and no friend to Pentecost and Parker.
The clock is ticking to get Bodine back alive, but circumstances conspire to pull both investigators away from the case. Will is hot on the trail of a stickup team who are using her name—and maybe her gun—for their own ends. While Lillian again finds herself up against murder-obsessed millionaire Jessup Quincannon, who has discovered a secret from her past—something he plans to use to either rein the great detective in . . . or destroy her.
To solve this mystery, and defeat their own personal demons, the pair will have to go nose-to-nose with murderous gangsters, make deals with conniving federal agents, confront Nazi spies, and bend their own ethical rules to the point of breaking. Before time runs out for everyone.
STEPHEN SPOTSWOOD is an award-winning playwright, journalist, and educator. As a journalist, he has spent much of the last two decades writing about the aftermath of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the struggles of wounded veterans. His dramatic work has been widely produced across the United States and he is the winner of the 2021 Nero Award for best American mystery. He makes his home in Washington, DC with his wife, young adult author Jessica Spotswood.
If you’re a fan of Stephen Spotswood, or Nero Wolfe, you’ll want to watch the conversation.