No Need to Hit the Panic Button Yet

"A beautiful way to say". . . . Riiiight

I've known Sister Mary Murderous for years now. She's organized and meticulous, so I didn't panic when she mentioned last Friday she had pretty much completed her holiday shopping. It's when my not-so-well-organized husband told me he's done that I started getting very nervous about not being finished myself.

Fellow how-the-heck-did-we-get-ourselves-into-this-last-minute-predicament shoppers, it's not down to the wire yet, but we do need to get cracking. Let's muster our self-discipline and seriousness of purpose. No more starting to do online research into a gift for little Susie and getting side-tracked somehow into winter bird irruptions in North America, because that leads to wondering what a Bohemian Waxwing looks like, and before you know it, you're looking at a map of the Czech Republic, which has nothing to do with a Christmas present for 10-year-old Susie.

Okay. I'm going to tell you about some gifts I'm giving this year and share some strategies in case you're running out of time to shop.

Don't get sidetracked by looking up "Antsy Pants"

My husband is one of those people who is easy to shop for once you've figured out the hopeless gifts––clothes––and the sure bets based on his interests––movies, post-World War II history, sports, science, and rock 'n roll. Past presents for the man whose favorite movie is 1947's Out of the Past include a subscription to Netflix tucked into Foster Hirsch's The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir. He enjoyed that book and Eddie Muller's jauntier Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir. Another hit was nonfiction about American workers in all walks of life, oral historian Studs Terkel's Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. It was published in 1974, and many of the jobs it describes are greatly changed or no longer exist; however, existential questions involving what it means to work at your job remain the same, people are still people, and this book is wonderful.

The book I'm giving Hubby this Christmas is Rock Covers, by Jon Kirby, Robbie Busch, and Julius Widemann, published earlier this month by Taschen. Time Magazine describes this 550-page book as "inclusive a selection of great, influential, bizarre, unsettling and, quite often, downright eye-popping rock and roll album covers that any fan is ever likely to find in one place." The more than 750 covers range from Robert Mapplethorpe's photograph for Patti Smith's Horses to the surreal collage designed by artists Peter Blake and Jann Haworth from a Paul McCartney ink drawing for the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. I can't wait to see my husband open it––and to look at all these album covers from rock 'n roll.

Note: Do not get distracted by investigating the Kitten Covers (here), which substitute kittens (what else?) for people on albums such as Nirvana's Nevermind, the Clash's London Calling, and Tom Waits's Swordfishtrombones. We could get even further off the tracks by checking into the possibility of animals other than kittens on covers, but we won't do that, will we? People, we're at the serious task of completing our holiday shopping.

Say you have a crime fiction-loving friend, but you're unsure what he or she has read. Think in terms of combinations. You can buy a vintage book cheap at a used bookstore, and then give it with something else. For example, an old Agatha Christie featuring Jane Marple, such as A Murder Is Announced, could be gift wrapped with some knitting needles and gorgeous yarn for a winter scarf. (Staff at yarn shops are always friendly and will be happy to help you add a simple how-to pamphlet if your mystery lover doesn't yet know how to knit. Trust me, anyone can knit a beautiful scarf.) Give Jim Thompson's gritty The Killer Inside Me with a lovely mirror or a bottle of really good hard stuff. Michael Innes's 1938 Lament for a Maker needs a bottle of Scotch, but Dashiell Hammett's charming The Thin Man needs martini glasses and fixings. Combine a Lord Peter Wimsey book by Dorothy L. Sayers (it's hard to go wrong with Murder Must Advertise or The Nine Tailors) with a tea pot and/or tea.

Gift wrap a tin of hot chocolate and a pretty mug or a box of chocolates with a fun Golden-Age classic (i.e., Anthony Berkeley Cox's The Poisoned Chocolates Case, Georgette Heyer's Envious Casca or Behold, Here's Poison!, or Ngaio Marsh's Tied Up in Tinsel or Overture to Death). Give a book with the movie made from it (Robert Bloch's Psycho, Stephen King's The Shining) or present a book with something appropriately useful (a Simenon book with a bottle of French perfume; Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train and a nice pair of gloves; John Dickson Carr's The Case of the Constant Suicides or another locked-room mystery and a lockable box for jewelry or other treasures; Dorothy L. Sayers's Have His Carcase and a Swiss Army knife; Halloween, by Curtis Richards and John Carpenter, and a chain saw). Or pick any old mystery and add a jig-saw puzzle. You get the picture.

You should be able to find the following books in a local bookstore so you can meet the Christmas deadline without ordering online and paying for one-day shipping.

Have kids or grandkids around 8 to 10 years of age yourself or looking for a family gift for someone who does? This one is for you. A couple of years ago, writers Joshua Glenn and Elizabeth Foy Larsen came up with an antidote to boredom and a way to get kids off their electronic devices––for a break, at least. One of my friends loved their Unbored: The Essential Field Guide to Serious Fun. Now there's Unbored Games: Serious Fun for Everyone (Bloomsbury USA, October 2014), which combines informative how-to's with entertaining things to do. Activities such as geocaching, board-game hacking, code-cracking, and classic science experiments are combined with "best-of" lists, trivia, and Q&A's with experts. These lavishly illustrated books are highly rated by reviewers and deserve a place on a shelf––or in your favorite 10-year-old's backpack.

Fourth of July Creek by Smith Henderson (Ecco, May 2014) takes a look at America's rural poor, specifically, those in Tenmile, Montana, and the cultural issues of the 1980s as Carter was leaving office and Reagan was stepping in. Henderson wrote the Super Bowl commercial "Halftime in America" narrated by Clint Eastwood, and his first novel involves Pete Snow, a long-haired social worker better at helping others than himself, a half-feral 11-year-old boy named Benjamin Pearl, and Ben's dad, "Tribulation-ready, Race War-ready" survivalist Jeremiah Pearl. If your gift recipient likes the bleak worldview, moral ambiguity, and flawed characters found in books by Daniel Woodrell (Winter's Bone) or Pete Dexter (The Paperboy), he or she would probably like this beautifully written novel, which made the New York Times list of 100 notable 2014 books.

I'm giving Marlon James's novel, which is making many favorite-books-of-the-year lists, including mine, to an avid-reader friend who had the sort of year that, in the retelling, makes you unsure whether to laugh or cry. It's not an easy read at the beginning because writer James doesn't let you wade in, he just dumps you headfirst into events (the first bit is written by a ghost), and while you're trying to get up to speed on what's been happening, you're dealing with the multiple narrators' dialects, free associations, and the whole shebang.

Ask yourself before you buy it, "Does my recipient have the patience to fall under a spell?" I hope the answer is yes, because the acclimation process itself is pleasurably head-spinning (don't worry, there's no need to write anything down, it all becomes clear through a process kinda like passive osmosis), and after you're acclimated, the book is mesmerizing. A Brief History of Seven Killings (Riverhead Hardcover, October 2014) is a fictionalized treatment of the 1976 attempted assassination of Jamaican Reggae singer Bob Marley (never mentioned by name). The 700-pager spans decades, hops continents, and features many characters, ranging from drug dealers and assassins to journalists, politicians, and ghosts. I'd suggest an accompaniment of Jamaican rum or something else Jamaican if you live in Colorado or Washington State, but really, this imaginative book is a gift that makes it on its own.

One of my young relatives will soon move into an apartment with friends. They all love good food, which means they'll need a good general cookbook. One of the best is The New Best Recipe by Cooks Illustrated Magazine. I recently bought it for myself after reading Powell's Books staffer Suzanne G.'s review, "If I have to pick one book, I want it to be the book that explains in detail how it tested multiple versions of each recipe, what the results were, why the authors picked the one they decided was best, and what variations they suggest. At a thousand fully-explained recipes, this dictionary-size reference book is the first one I consult for everything from eggplant Parmesan to steamed mussels to carrot cake. Much more authoritative than Googling, it's the Consumer Reports of classic recipes." Yeah, I agree, it's great, and it can be someone's only or most-used cookbook.

Someone on your gift list like my sister, who has a sweet tooth and loves to bake? I'm oohing and aahhing over Zoe Nathan's scrumptuous-looking Huckleberry: Recipes, Stories, and Secrets from Our Kitchen (Chronicle, September 2014). The Huckleberry Bakery & Cafe is one of Santa Monica's favorite breakfast places, and its recipes cover both the sweet and savory sides. Right now I would kill for a piece of what's on the cover and a good cup of coffee.

Let's finish up with one last gift suggestion, so we can finish our coffee and get to the bookstore. A friend on my gift list is an environmentalist who loves the desert country of north-central New Mexico. One year I gave her Edward Abbey's comic-adventure masterpiece, The Monkey Wrench Gang (Harper Perennial, September 2014; first published 1975), featuring Vietnam veteran George Washington Hayduke III, who returns to the desert to find it threatened by industrial development. He joins forces with a motley crew to fight it.

This year I'm giving her a book of nonfiction: Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (Henry Holt, February 2014). Kolbert is a New Yorker staff writer who consulted scientists in a variety of disciplines, such as botany, geology, and wildlife biology. She uses thirteen chapters, focusing on individuals from a dozen species, to explore the disquieting story of their threatened extinction. This is nonfiction at its suspenseful best. With its wittiness, historical perspective, and field reporting, it reads like a novel. It's a depressing, but ultimately inspiring book. I highly recommend it for the science- or natural history-lover on your list.

Okay, folks, it's off to the bookstore. Good luck, and happy holiday shopping!

Books in Their Stockings?

Don't hate me, but I'm almost done with my Christmas shopping. I like searching for the perfect gift, especially if it's a book. It's even more fun to talk with my book-loving friends about books for giving. Here are some gift books I've been buying, along with some I've been talking about for presents with my friends.

I have a World War II veteran in my life who had what they call a "good war." He never had a serious injury, was never under fire (he was a radio operator) and he went to a lot of places in the world that a midwestern farm boy never expected to see. He loves revisiting his war years and most enjoys getting books about the war and about science, his postwar career.

This year, he's getting (hey, buddy, if you're reading this post, quit reading now––and pay no attention to that book cover over there!) The New York Times Complete World War II: All the Coverage From the Battlefields to the Home Front (Black Dog & Leventhal, 2013). The coverage starts from before the war, and you can read articles in which pundits confidently assert that Hitler won't become a dictator. Because these are reproductions of newspaper articles, there aren't as many photographs as you see in a lot of these popular history books, but it's hard to beat that time-traveling "you are there" feeling of contemporary newspaper articles.

The book's articles (in 612 pages) were selected by the respected historian Richard Overy. But if you don't want to be selective, never fear. It also comes with a DVD of almost 100,000 WW2-related articles from The New York Times.

My veteran's science book present this year is Randall Munroe's What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014). Here's one question: "What if the earth and all terrestrial objects suddenly stopped spinning, but the atmosphere retained its velocity?" Munroe spends several pages explaining the horrific results in a scientifically rigorous, but blithely humorous tone. To give you an idea, he begins: "Nearly everyone would die. Then things would get interesting." The more I look at this book, the more I think I might need extra copies.

This vet has been married for 70 years to a woman who, sadly, has dementia. The effect for her is a loss of the ability to make new memories. She was an avid reader, and I bought her books for most of the 40-plus Christmases I've known her. Now, she can't remember what she reads, so I've had to find other presents over the last few years. But she still has a wonderful memory for the old days and enjoys reminiscing, so this year I'm going to see if she likes revisiting landmark moments through this book: Life: The Classic Collection (Life, 2008).

There is relatively little text in this volume; it's mostly just large-format reproductions of the iconic photographs that appeared in the 20th century in Life magazine; photos like President-elect Truman holding up the newspaper with the famous "Dewey defeats Truman" headline, the D-Day landing on Omaha Beach, that sailor kissing that nurse in Times Square at the end of WW2, athletes giving the heads-bowed black power salute at the 1968 Olympics, celebrities like Louis Armstrong, Rita Hayworth, Marilyn Monroe. One of the bonus features is that some of the photographs are reproduced a second time, so that the buyer can remove the second photo and frame it.

I was hanging out with a longtime friend last weekend, and her daughter and son-in-law were visiting from the UK. He has a fellowship at Cambridge University. He's an Oxford University graduate and was enjoying telling stories about Cambridge. One was about the arcane rules for visiting Trinity College, and how condescending its staff were when they explained that of course there could be no visitors to the college when the chapel was closed.

Since we had also been talking about books to read over the holiday break, that gave me the perfect opportunity to recommend my absolute favorite read of 2014, Ben Macintyre's A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal (Crown, 2014). Not only is this a fantastic read, I told him, it has an added particular benefit for you. Next time some Trinity College staffer gets uppity, you might remind him that Trinity College was the breeding ground for the members of the Cambridge Spy Ring, the greatest traitors in English history!

We also had a good long chat about the English, which was great fun for me, since I'm an anglophile. They both recommended a book they'd been reading, Kate Fox's Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behavior (2nd Edition, Nicholas Brealey America, 2014). The fine gradations of social class and the dizzying array of behaviors that identify whether someone is working class, lower middle, middle middle, upper middle, upper class, and when/where/why it matters is mind-boggling to an American. But I figure if this couple, one American and one English, both enthusiastically recommend this book, I had to pass it on to my personal Santa, to put on my "nice" list.

Speaking of my personal Santa (not to mention photography books and World War II), he's also been informed that my list includes Berlin 1945: World War II: Photos of the Aftermath, by Michael Brettin, Peter Kroh and Eva C. Schweitzer (Berlinica Publishing LLC, 2014). I remember, many years ago, seeing the movie The Big Lift, with Montgomery Clift, filmed in the ruins of Berlin, and being completely distracted from the story because it was stunning to see the utter devastation and how the lives of Berliners had become primitive struggles just to get water and food enough to survive.

According to the publisher, most of these photographs, taken by Red Army personnel in the immediate aftermath of their overrunning the city, have never before been published in the US. Der Spiegel says: "These photos depict a grotesque normalcy, beyond the well-known iconography of heroic liberations and optimistic rebuilding." I'm sure it will be fascinating.

Remember my longtime friend I mentioned earlier? Her mother turned 100 years old this year. Her greatest pleasure is reading, and her favorite genre is romance––traditional, not the new stuff with all that graphic sex. For her, I'm suggesting some D. E. Stevenson books published back when she was about half her current age. My favorite Stevenson novel is Miss Buncle's Book, about a young woman in a village who is in dire financial straits. She thinks writing a book might be a way to make money, but all she knows about is her village and the people in it. So, using a pseudonym and changing the name of the village and the people, that's what she writes about. When the book is published and becomes a runaway success, though, people in the village soon figure out it's about them, warts and all, and they want to know just who wrote it. This is a delightful comedy, and a sweet romance with Miss Buncle and her publisher.

For a traditional romance reader, I think other good D. E. Stevenson choices would be the paired books Sarah Morris Remembers and Sarah's Cottage. These are stories about a young woman who, in the first book, grows up in an English village with her mother, vicar father, two brothers and one sister, enjoys visiting her grandparents in Scotland, and falls in love with a visiting scholar from Germany with whom she loses contact during World War II.

In the sequel, Sarah is working during the war at a large London department store as a top customer service assistant, dealing with customers who speak only French or German. There are many amusing moments with a wide variety of these customers. Sarah is also challenged by her younger sister, Lottie, a beautiful, but spoiled young woman who has married extremely well and thinks of nothing but her social life, not her young daughter. So why is it called Sarah's Cottage? Well, because Sarah's life changes radically and she moves to Scotland, to a cottage on her grandparents' land. The rest of the book describes her life there. Both books transport you to a simpler time, but one with just as many trials and joys as we have today. Oh, and these books are available in audiobook form, which may be convenient if your recipient has vision problems.

Yes, I noticed that there are no mysteries in this post. You can't have everything!

And not everybody wants books in their stockings, hard to accept as that may be. Get them the usual sweaters, scarves, video games, toys, electronics and what have you. If you're looking for good stocking-stuffers, what would be better to put in a stocking than socks? And if you ask me, the best ones come from Darn Tough Vermont.

I have these

and these

  

I don't have these . . . yet

What if You Just Can't Wait

So for the past several weeks we have been tempting and tantalizing readers with exciting new books soon to be published. These will be on the market shelves soon.

But it's a little bit like having a package sitting under the tree with a tag warning not to be opened until Christmas. What if we need something to read now? My way of coping includes a little pile of seasonal reads that are just the thing to put me into a festive spirit.

There are a few things that you can enjoy throughout the holiday season that help make up for the hustle of the holiday preparations and cut off the feelings of bah humbug that can creep up on the over-stressed.

One of my favorite––but slightly guilty––pleasures is eggnog. Every year, we wait for our favorite dairy to put out their version of smooth, creamy, sweet frothy goodness. This may not be on your diet, but there is a literary substitute and that is the heart-warming holiday stories written by Debbie Macomber. Macomber is an extremely prolific New York Times best-selling author whose novels embrace the best things in life: home, family, community and friendship laced with a soupçon of romance.

This year's offerings include Mr. Miracle. It's about an impractical relationship. Intrepid, headstrong Addie Folsom left home to follow a rainbow to a pot of gold in Montana. Like most pots of this sort, it was a mirage and Addie struggled to make a living without letting anyone at home realize how bad things had gotten.

When her father died, she thought she would come back to Tacoma, Washington to spend Christmas with her mom and to restart her college education. Like many plans, this one goes awry and fate has a double whammy in mind for Addie. Not only is her mother going on a longed-for cruise, but her next-door neighbor, Erich, has been in an accident that has broken both his arms––and some of his spirit. This is a disaster in many ways; I know someone this happened to.

As it happened, Erich had been a pest of a boy with a slightly malicious streak, and Addie would have rather have dealt him a backhand than lent him one. Now he is merely a curmudgeon who feels that Scrooge got a bum rap. But Addie has an angel on her side.

Voilá, all the ingredients for a heart-warming tale of the kind Macomber excels at. I have enjoyed her books in the past but my take on this one is––bah, humbug.

Maybe you like your eggnog with a jolt. Consider breaking out one of Anne Perry's annual Christmas treats. She includes betrayal, greed and murder with the warming of the cockles in the heart. This year, her tale takes place in a New York City that is still young, sparkling and full of life in 1904, but also still hiding menace around the corners. In A New York Christmas, Thomas Pitt's daughter, Jemima, is traveling with a friend across the north Atlantic. Her friend, Delphinia, is getting married in NYC to a scion of a fabulously rich and aristocratic family.

The snake in this particular garden is a Delphinia's mother, Maria, who mysteriously disappeared many years ago. For some very obscure reason, the family expects Maria to jump up like a jack-in-the-box and ruin the festivities. We have to leave it to Jemima with the help of a handsome New York cop to make things calm and bright.

Both of these writers have produced scads of these holiday stories, so if in either case one is not enough, there's plenty of backup to get you in the mood.

Fruitcake is another favorite that is mostly seen at this time of year. It is loved, hated or ignored and put aside until it hardens into a grand doorstop. I do get a kick out of those recipes calling for the freshest of ingredients. Is there such a thing as fresh dried and candied fruit? One important feature of all fruitcakes is the variety of textures and flavors.

The best literary comparison to this culinary extravaganza is Otto Penzler's collections of mystery stories. Penzler, who looks a little like Santa himself, is the proprietor of The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City, and each year for about 17 years, Penzler asked leading crime writers to pen an original Christmas story. These stories were reproduced in pamphlet form and given to the customers of the bookstore as a Christmas present. The stories were collected in Christmas at the Mysterious Bookshop.

Some of the authors included are Lisa Atkinson, Lawrence Block, Mary Higgins Clark, and Ed McBain. The stories range from humorous to pure detection, and the anthology covers all aspects of the festive season. There are unscrupulous Santas, poisonous puddings, and deadly deeds, which combine to make luscious yuletide terror––just like fruitcake. I admit I really loved my mom's fruitcake, which was highly anticipated every year. That could have been because it had been doused in Cognac for weeks.

Penzler has a second collection that includes 60 of his all-time favorite Christmas crime stories. There are mysteries from Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson and Thomas Hardy, written long ago, and some written a century later by modern writers like Sara Paretsky. It is The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries. These are keeper books and they join Naughty: Nine Tales of Christmas Crime by Steve Hockensmith, in my Christmas reading basket year after year.

I have never had the opportunity to skim along the snow on a sleigh ride. The closest thing I ever came to it was in Chris Grabenstein's Slay Ride. It's about a young man, Scott Wilkinson, who hops into a car-service Lincoln expecting an enjoyable dash through the snow. But, in minutes, he's far from laughing, because his chauffeur drives like a maniac with menace on his mind. Scott gets home safely, but he opens Pandora's box when he decides to complain. He has no idea what events he has just set in motion because of his bell ringing. This story introduced Christopher Miller, aka "Saint Chris," an FBI legend, and he returns in another ride from Grabenstein in Hell for the Holidays.

Lastly, references to angels pop up a lot at this time of year. "Every time a bell rings an angel gets his wings" is how that memorable Christmas film It's a Wonderful Life ends. To get another perspective on angels you should try Christopher Moore's The Stupidest Angel. None other than the archangel Raziel has come to earth seeking a small child who needs a wish granted.

Little Joshua Barker desperately needs a holiday miracle. It's not that that he dying of cancer, or that he has a miserable life or even that he has lost his dog. It's worse. He had seen someone whack Santa Claus with a shovel and his wish is that Santa come back from the dead.

Raziel has lost his touch in the good works department, and before he's done, he has caused more than enough Christmas chaos and hilarity. This might be hard to forgive. Will he lose his wings? I was laughing enough that I had to dry my eyes to find out.

Many of my favorite authors have books that take place in December and occasionally incorporate the seasonal holidays. The best lists around of Christmas crime literature can be found on the blog Mystery Fanfare starting here: Christmas mysteries: Authors A-D

Have Yourself a Cozy Little Christmas

My daughter used to sing a little Christmas shopping ditty to the tune of Jingle Bells that started "Schlepping  through the slush/ With eight bags in my hands/Four more stores to go/And  sleet comes down in bands." We would have to stop frequently for nourishment and to thaw out our feet and check our lists in those days.

Nowadays, I spend less time schlepping and more time clicking––gotta love that internet!––but the principle is the same: holiday gift shopping, however you do it, is hard work, and accomplishing all or part of it earns the shopper a break and a modest reward. Warm hearths, good books, and chocolate aprés shopping are appropriate.

Dogs and mountains make a wonderful cozy combination, and Christmas seems particularly suited to those pleasures. In Donna Ball's Silent Night, Raine Stockton and her rescue dog Cisco are facing their first Christmas with no human companions since her divorce from Buck, the sheriff in their small North Carolina town. She is surprised when Miles, a rich developer smitten with her, shows up for the annual Christmas parade (she and Cisco are herding the live sheep) with a sullen adolescent daughter in tow whose mother is in Brazil on her third honeymoon.

A murder, a live newborn showing up in the town's Christmas crèche, and Miles's bratty daughter, Melanie, contrive to keep the holiday season full. Author Donna Ball obviously loves dogs, and dog lovers have followed this series with much interest, as it provides a lot of information about rescue dog training and use in the wild Appalachian mountains.

If you crave a tongue-in-cheek English village cozy, Andrea Frazer's Belchester Chronicles are light and amusing. In White Christmas with a Wobbly Knee, Lady Amanda Golightly and her friend, Hugo Cholmondley-Crighton-Crump, have decided to open her stately home to tours. To practice, they invite a few old friends in for drinks and tours on Boxing Day.

When one of the guests, a writer who is penning an exposé that he claims will blow the village wide open, is found dead in the library––murdered by five different methods––plans are changed abruptly for everyone. And if you think your relatives are difficult at Christmas, Lady Amanda's mother, declared dead many years ago, shows up unexpectedly to visit while her villa in France is being renovated. This is a silly, charming series; perfect for a mildly bibulous evening by the fire.

Nero Wolfe is far from the first detective who springs to mind at Christmas, but Rex Stout's And Four to Go contains four short stories set around various holidays.

In Christmas Party, sheer desperation drives the maestro to folly. A friend of Archie's wants to pressure her boyfriend to pop the question, and asks for his help. Archie produces a faked marriage license and agrees to escort her to a party where she will announce their "engagement."

When Wolfe wants Archie to do something for him instead of attending the party, the annoyed sidekick produces the license and discusses his upcoming nuptials with his flabbergasted boss. To assess this catastrophe in the making, Wolfe leaves his brownstone and attends the party disguised in a Santa suit. When a man is found murdered, the mortified misogynist flees rather than be unmasked, thus becoming Inspector Cramer's prime suspect.

The Cat Who Turned On and Off is probably my favorite in the late Lilian Jackson Braun's lengthy series featuring James Qwilleran and his ace cat detectives, Koko and Yum Yum. Qwilleran, a recovering alcoholic and reporter for The Daily Fluxion, acquired both of the beautiful Siamese cats by default when their respective owners were murdered. As the story opens, the three are sharing a room in a hotel one scant step above sleazy. Qwil is in a bit of a bind; he has no furniture so wants to find a furnished apartment, but can't find a landlord willing to risk his furniture to a pair of cats with all their claws. Hoping to win a cash prize offered for the best Christmas story, he sells his editor on a series about Junktown, a section of the city with numerous antique and junk shops.

When Qwil attends an auction of the stock of a dealer killed in an accident and learns that the victim's apartment over the shop of junkers Iris and C.C. Cobb is available, he jumps at the opportunity. As any cat owner could tell you, mayhem and the occasional theft of small objects ensue. But murder is over the top, and dainty Yum Yum, an accomplished thief, keeps bringing curious items that suggest a motive for the crime.

This third book in the series was written in the 1960s, and the author took a 30-year hiatus after it before writing another. Followers of the series will know that Qwil's situation changed dramatically after he met his billionaire godmother, but these few early books about his hardscrabble life "down below" and his introduction to Koko and Yum Yum have a special charm for the season.

The weather has been both unsettled and uncivil over much of the US and Europe in the run up to Christmas this year. Shopping and traveling plans have been disrupted, and shoppers are scrambling for those last few items even as airlines frantically reschedule and reroute.

I hope that your plans and homes are not in too much disarray; if they are, remember just how much disarray the original cause of this celebration brought to the unsuspecting world! Joy and peace to all this season, and whether you are shopping or mopping, wrapping or cooking today, try to find a little time to be kind to yourself as well. Merry Christmas, all!

What they said...