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Jólabókaflóð, or Christmas Book Flood, is a literary tradition a number of American readers have been borrowing over the last few years. It centers on buying books for friends and loved ones and giving them on Christmas Eve. In this way, you can share your love of books and spend the evening reading by the Christmas tree, fireplace, or wherever you spend this important day.

If you’d like to know more about the tradition, check out my post in which I speak with the president of the Icelandic Publishers Association, Heiðar Ingi Svansson.

These titles are sure to keep you reading late into the night this Jólabókaflóð!

Ezra James used to be a big deal: Harvard graduate, FBI agent, beautiful wife. After being accused of fabricating evidence in a serial killer trial, he finds himself suspended, on the verge of a divorce, and working security at a posh Catholic school in Chicago. Then something out-of-the-ordinary happens: a young student-teacher is attacked during a Christmas pageant and left for dead in the snow with a noose around her neck and an electrical burn. Plus, she’s pregnant. Ezra, along with up-and-coming police detective, Lucia Vargas, and school chaplain, Fr. Remy Mbombo, must work fast before the culprit returns to finish the job. Get an ebook for only $0.99 on Kindle.

A mystery that starts and ends in the snow, this one is the perfect companion for your Christmas Eve.

Gwyneth Camm has just inherited her great-aunt’s house in Salem, Massachusetts, along with an
extensive collection of gothic romance novels. As a PhD student who prefers “serious” books,
Gwyn has always avoided pulp fiction. Now, in honor of her beloved Aunt Ethel, she gives one
of the gothics a try…and promptly falls asleep.

When she wakes, she finds herself inside the story, thrust by forces unknown into the heroine’s
role. There’s magic afoot, and the only way back to her own life is to play her part and solve the
mystery.

When fiction becomes fact, anything can happen… Read today on Kindle for only $3.99!

After being widowed and surviving the wrath of a serial killer, Jessica believes her misfortunes are over. She’s reunited with her first love, Jon, and together, with her son Bryce, and a baby on the way, they’re living their happily ever after on their ranch in Montana. That is until secrets, lies, and a formidable foe from Jon’s past emerge to shake the foundation of their relationship, forcing them to flee for their lives.

A decade earlier, Jon worked undercover for the FBI. He infiltrated Hugh Jones’ Kansas City Mob, and almost destroyed his empire. Unaware of the breech in his own defenses, Hugh, obsessed with revenge, unleashes every weapon in his arsenal, targeting those Jon loves the most.

Read today! Starting as low at $4.99!

Read it today for only $5.99!

This delightful series focuses on the humorous mystery and romantic adventures of the kind folks who live in the environs of a small village nestled on Lake Superior in northern Wisconsin. Along the way in the series, silkie chickens, a giant prehistoric beaver skeleton, a kidnapped reindeer, and other flora and fauna contribute to the amusing mischief and mayhem.

When her pet reindeer, Rudolph, is stolen from the live animal holiday display, first-grade teacher Crystal Hagan has a big problem on her hands. Her students fear that Christmas will be canceled. Ironically, the prime suspect is a man who lives in a mansion known as the “North Pole”. And to her shock, Peter LeBarron admits to kidnapping Rudolph and he won’t give him back without some romantic “negotiations”.

Read now for just $2.99!

First grade teacher Desiree Tucker is on the brink of winter holidays with her new, romantic boyfriend when danger encroaches on her joy. Ominous, untraceable texts buzz on her cell phone. Terrifying secret Santa gifts show up for her in the classroom. As the stalker moves closer to the prey, Desiree doesn’t know who she can trust. Her charming new man is a prime suspect. Is he a deadly stalker? If not him, who? What can she learn from the legend of the snow kiss cookie? Just when she’s starting to believe in magic again, she finds herself fighting for her life. Cookie recipe included.

Read today for just $2.99!

Humorous cozy mystery Death by Sample Size is set in wintertime Los Angeles, where
the year-round weather is so mild and balmy that one must consult the calendar to confirm which
season it is. Weather plays a big role in the plot as the protagonist is the vice president of sales of
a ladies’ swimwear company. Weather wimp Holly Schlivnik would never survive living in a
cold-weather area. She lives on a houseboat and drives a vintage convertible with the top down
twelve months a year.

Read today for just $0.99!

Till death do us part, with kitchen shears. When a family man kills his wife, the Fog Ladies—spunky senior sleuths in an elegant apartment building in San Francisco—set out to discover the truth. They find a years-old Christmas murder, undertake a Christmas visit to a women’s prison with the best gift ever, and discover a Christmas clue to the true killer. Unfortunately, marriage can be deadly.

Read today for just $4.99!

Oxford, England 1993. An awkward American grad student hits a gorgeous English undergrad with her bicycle. She’s embarrassed. He’s intrigued. They go their separate ways, but neither forgets.

Chicago, Illinois December 2013. Successful novelist Cress Taylor starts receiving anonymous threats that undermine her world. When a figure from her past turns up at a book signing and wants to renew their fleeting acquaintance,  Cress wonders if the timing is coincidental or suspicious? Should she fall into his arms or run like hell?

A former spy now working for a global security company, Max Grant has always steered clear of relationships—until now. When he sees Cress in a TV interview, his curiosity ignites. Will the spark he felt twenty years ago burst into flame? Cress is a magnet he can’t resist. 

      As threats escalate, Max feels driven to protect Cress but she’s not sure she can trust him. Complicating  everything, Max’s big Scottish family will arrive soon in Chicago for Christmas.   

          Can she overcome her fears and is he willing to give up his secrets so they can have a Happy New Year?

Read on Kindle Unlimited for free!

Magic, Mimosas & Mistletoe is the high-spirited third book in the Charmed Cocktail Cozy mystery series. If you like ghost mysteries with holiday slaying, you’ll love M.L. Bonatch’s festive read!

Buy Magic, Mimosas & Mistletoe to cheer your holiday spirit today and all year!

Read today on Kindle Unlimited!

In this classic 1953 story by Flannery O’Connor, a grandmother subtly navigates her family’s travel plans…with disastrous results.

Read the story here first.

“A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is an absolute favorite of mine to teach. Unlike, “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” or “Revelation,” it resists a straight-forward moralistic reading. While O’Connor’s Catholicism is overt in those stories—and many others like it—here it comes to the reader at a slant, and a disturbing slant at that. Though the story resists an easy moral, it offers writing students a great look at escalation, intention, and irony.

“The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida,” the story begins and everything that unfolds from that point onward is a direct result of her desires and meddling. In order to avoid the terrible fate of Floridian travel, she warns her son Bailey about a dangerous outlaw nicknamed The Misfit who has broken free from prison and is supposedly headed to Florida. “You read here what it says he did to these people,” she tells Bailey. “Just you read it.” From this point forward, she uses fear, deception, and filial and Christian obligation to steer her family toward absolute tragedy.

One thing I noticed the last time I read this story was the cat. Because her son doesn’t want to bring the family cat, the grandmother must hide it beneath her valise in a basket. Once the grandmother has guilt-tripped, tricked, or otherwise manipulated the characters onto that fateful dirt road, hilly with “sudden washes in it and sharp curves on dangerous embankments,” the grandmother realizes the house they’re looking for with it’s mythical silver-filled “secret panel” is located elsewhere.

“The thought was so embarrassing that she turned red in the face and her eyes dilated and her feet jumped up, upsetting the valise.” What comes next is a beauty of escalation, cause-and-effect, and payoff. Pitty Sing, the cat, leaps onto Bailey’s shoulder who is driving the car. He sends the car turning over and its occupants flying.

There on the side of the road, the family waits for help, but are met instead by The Misfit himself. At this point, all of the grandmother’s conniving and cajoling fail. In the end, she gives up trying to control others and has a transcendent moment, seeing the Misfit not as a tool for her use (to strike fear, to persuade, to comment on the state of the world) but as a human being with a soul: “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!”

The theological implications of this moment and the stark critique of the grandmother’s brand of Christian judgment are profound, but what I am most drawn to as a teacher and writer is the ironic cause-and-effect that drives the narrative forward. In nearly every action, the grandmother inadvertently causes their meeting with The Misfit to come about. It is all her fault. O’Connor makes no concessions about this. The grandmother begins with a simple argument—If you don’t listen to me, we will all be murdered by this monster—and develops and complicates it throughout.

A simple set of rules for a devilishly ironic story could be derived at this point:

1. The protagonist is her own antagonist.
2. Her actions necessarily push the story forward to the climax.
3. Finally, the end is the exact opposite of what she wants or said she wants.

Concerning #3: What does the grandmother want in this story? She wants to tag along and she wants to call the shots. In the end, she does just that. The irony arises, not because she meets the Misfit or because she feared the Misfit. Rather, she has used him as a boogeyman to achieve her far less profound goals. If her true goal was to be a part of the family’s trip and determine its destination, then voila, she has succeeded. We laugh or recoil or toss the story across the room because through all of her fear mongering she has produced the very monster herself.

In the end “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is a critique of the entire family—the fear monger most, but also those people willing to be lead by the fear of bad ends, as improbable as they may be.

Perhaps the most popular mystery novel of all time, this classic novel pits a nearly superhuman detective against a nearly unsolvable mystery—all in the claustrophobic confines of a snowed-in train. What makes this novel so popular and adaptable? Let’s take a look.

Neither of the film adaptations I’ve seen do this fantastic novel justice. As wonderful as Kenneth Branagh is, his portrayal of famed detective Hercule Poirot came off more cartoonish than superhuman. (That being said, I will be first in line for Death on the Nile, which is set to release later this year.) For me Poirot will always be Sherlock Holmes plus age and experience and a soul and mustaches and a Belgian accent. He isn’t a joke—although, I do have a number of Poirot novels to read.

If you haven’t read any Christie, this is a great introduction. And Then There Were None is arguably her best novel, but it doesn’t star Poirot. The first novel to feature the Belgian detective is A Mysterious Affair at Styles, but I argue this can be read after MOTOE. There are at least three reasons for this:

1. By the time Christie wrote this one, Hercule Poirot was established as a character and his keen senses are a wonder (at one point he reveals a character’s true identity by deciphering that an “H” we readers have been holding in our minds as a major clue is actually a Cyrillic “N.”)
2. The evidence and interviews are handled systematically in a highly teachable method (Poirot travels from train car to train car, establishing an easy to visualize chronology).
3. The climax and wrap-up are highly logical and highly surprising, and Poirot’s role is incredibly human rather than legalistic.

Furthermore, the characters, not just Poirot, are intensely fascinating in ways that characters from mysteries of that time period often weren’t. Frequently, a character existed for the sake of their clue or a telling anecdote or their role in the murder. Here, every person has a soul. Perhaps this is in part due to the historical context in which the book takes place. The kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby serves as a necessary backdrop for the novel.

Readers are still drawn to Agatha Christie today because of the brilliance of her detectives, her ability to render their thought processes intelligibly to her audience, and the complexity of even seemingly minor characters. For the aspiring mystery novelist, each of her novels serves as a master class in of itself, but especially this one.

Some take-aways after reading MOTOE:

1. Don’t forget to let your reader in on the detective’s thought process. Most of us won’t get there with just a list of clues.
2. Don’t forget to make your detective (whether they’re actual law enforcement or a curious/courageous individual) human.
3. It’s okay to make the make the crime nearly impossible to solve so long as when the detective reveals the answer, your reader feels that same joy one feels upon hearing the solution to a complicated but perfectly obvious riddle.

Haven’t read it? You must! Get a copy here.

Last year’s Edgar Award winner for best novel, Elly Griffin’s The Stranger Diaries looks at what happens when love turns deadly.

Buy it here: https://www.amazon.com/Stranger-Diaries-Elly-Griffiths/dp/1328577856

This was a particular favorite of mine from this year. For one, Clare Cassidy is an high school English teacher obsessed with a mystery writer, and it’s always nice to see oneself in print. While I am not a woman, and teach in America, not the UK, there was still plenty for me to relate to.

After a colleague is murdered, Clare’s life becomes entangled with the investigation headed by Harbinder Kaur, a detective sergeant who must hide her sexuality from her Sikh, immigrant family. While the novel is told primarily from Clare’s POV—her family and dating life, relationship to the victim, work on R. M. Holland’s short story “The Stranger,” and her diary all play key roles in the mystery—DS Kaur really stole the show for me. She is funny, insightful, and interesting whereas Clare is fairly straight-forward and, at times, stereotypical. It’s no surprise to me that Kaur has garnered her own series. (I just added the second book on Goodreads.)

In some mystery novels, the twists and turns feel predictable, the killer obvious. In others, the details are so well buried that the conclusion seems to come out of nowhere, and the detective seems like only a genius because the author made it so. The Stranger Diaries finds a happy middle ground. I was surprised by the ending, but not in a way that felt altogether satisfying. The killer’s motives felt underdeveloped and I didn’t hit my forehead and announce to my wife, “Of course! I should’ve seen it!” However, it did make sense, and the rest of the novel worked.

The school dynamics, the literary allusions, and the intriguing DS Kaur make The Stranger Diaries an incredibly readable novel that keeps you curious and guessing up to the last page.