Do you love Christmas, but hate waiting around all year for Santa to get his boots on? We all do! Get a wriggle on, Saint Nick – there are festive books to read, hot chocolate to drink and presents to enjoy!
While we’re waiting for the reindeer to finish eating their glitter balls and candy straw (or whatever those red-nosed flying four-foots fancy), here are 3 Festive Reads that will kick the Yuletide into gear.
So that you don’t spook people too early with your Christmas cheer, I’ve curated 2 books that won’t startle the last-minute xmas preppers – and 1 that will scream CHRISTMAS right into their beautiful faces.
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Happy Reading, Friends!
“Stephen King’s Holly marks the triumphant return of beloved King character Holly Gibney. Readers have witnessed Holly’s gradual transformation from a shy (but also brave and ethical) recluse in Mr Mercedes to Bill Hodges’s partner in Finders Keepers to a full-fledged, smart, and occasionally tough private detective in The Outsider. In King’s new novel, Holly is on her own, and up against a pair of unimaginably depraved and brilliantly disguised adversaries.
When Penny Dahl calls the Finders Keepers detective agency hoping for help locating her missing daughter, Holly is reluctant to accept the case. Her partner, Pete, has Covid. Her (very complicated) mother has just died. And Holly is meant to be on leave. But something in Penny Dahl’s desperate voice makes it impossible for Holly to turn her down.
Mere blocks from where Bonnie Dahl disappeared live Professors Rodney and Emily Harris. They are the picture of bourgeois respectability: married octogenarians, devoted to each other, and semi-retired lifelong academics. But they are harbouring an unholy secret in the basement of their well-kept, book-lined home, one that may be related to Bonnie’s disappearance. And it will prove nearly impossible to discover what they are up to: they are savvy, they are patient, and they are ruthless.
Holly must summon all her formidable talents to outthink and outmanoeuvre the shockingly twisted professors in this chilling new masterwork from Stephen King.”
I love Stephen King, and will always buy his books. You’ve got to support an up-and-coming writer when they show willing, am I right? Also, Wikipedia says Holly is a genus of small, evergreen trees with smooth, glabrous, or pubescent branchlets. Mmmm festively glabrous.
I definitely prefer King’s supernatural offerings to his crime writing – but the Bill Hodges/Holly Gibney books have been solid enough to keep me interested. This story has no supernatural portions, which I was crossing my fingers would appear until the end. Could it have hurt, to have Pennywise peek out from between some bookshelves at the end?? However, I digress.
I found Holly to be a strong character, and appreciated her grit as we moved through the plot. I also liked the conversations around how society dismisses people as they age, and how when we do ‘see’ people we often attribute a lot of stereotypes to them through our various filters.
King has strong views on covid and politics which are peppered through this story – as they have been in his last few books. Still, it’s his book, and more power to him. Keep writing, you spooky devil – and I’ll keep reading!
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“Leah thought Maitland Farm could give her a new life – but now old ghosts are dragging her into the past.
Following the tragic deaths of her husband and son, Leah is looking for a new life. Determined to bury her grief in hard work and desperate to escape Christmas and the reminders of what she has lost, she rushes through the purchase of a run-down Yorkshire farmhouse, arriving just as the snow shrouds her new home.
It might look like the loveliest Christmas card, but it’s soon clear it’s not just the house that needs renovation: the land is in bad heart, too. As Leah sets to work, she begins to see visions of the farm’s former occupants – and of the dark secrets that lie at the heart of Maitland Farm.
If Leah is to have a future, she must find a way to lay both her own past and theirs to rest – but the visions are becoming disturbingly real…”
If you like the thought of nodding off to a few Christmas tunes in a weed-filled country house, with a silhouette of a ghost child on the bedroom wall – then this book might be for you.
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“In Rudolph, New York, it’s Christmastime all year long. But this December, while the snow-lined streets seem merry and bright, a murder is about to ruin everyone’s holiday cheer in the first Year-Round Christmas mystery.
As the owner of Mrs. Claus’s Treasures, Merry Wilkinson knows how to decorate homes for the holidays. That’s why she thinks her float in the semi-annual Santa Claus parade is a shoe-in for best in show. But when the tractor pulling Merry’s float is sabotaged, she has to face facts: there’s a Scrooge in Christmas Town.
Merry isn’t ready to point fingers, especially with a journalist in town writing a puff piece about Rudolph’s Christmas spirit. But when she stumbles upon the reporter’s body on a late night dog walk—and police suspect he was poisoned by a gingerbread cookie crafted by her best friend, Vicky—Merry will have to put down the jingle bells and figure out who’s really been grinching about town, before Vicky ends up on Santa’s naughty list…’
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