Recommendsday: Series this Christmas

While some series regularly do a Christmas instalment, it feels like there are a higher than usual number of them this year, so I thought I’d do a recap as they’re starting to appear on the shelves.

One of the ones already on the shelves is Jenn McKinlay’s A Merry Little Murder Plot, the fifteenth in the Library Lovers series which came out last week in hardback in the US if you can lay your hands on it, and another is the thirty sixth (!) in Donna Andrews’s Meg Langslow Rockin’ Around the Chickadee which hit the shelves yesterday, again in hardback but unlike the McKinlay this does come on Kindle in the UK. There’s also number 11 in the Fixer-Upper series – The Knife Before Christmas is getting a hardback release according to Amazon, which is new thing for the Kate Carlisle series – when the previous book came out, I had that pre-ordered in the usual mass-market paperback size so I’m going to have to wait this time because a) my set won’t match and b) £23 is too rich for me when it comes to cozy crime.

There are also a couple of novellas linked to series – from Nita Prose there is The Mistletoe Mystery which came out last week and features Molly the Maid from The Maid and the Mystery Guest and from Richard Coles there is a Cannon Clement novella – Murder under the Mistletoe coming a week tomorrow on the 24th.

Moving into November there is the fourth Three Dahlias book which I have mentioned a couple of times already – A Very Lively Midwinter is out November 5 (and I have it pre-ordered) and on the same day there’s a new Albert Campion continuation from Mike Ripley – this one is called Mr Campion’s Christmas and is set in Norfolk in the early 1960s. There is also the 18th Royal Spyness novel which isn’t necessarily Christmas-set judging by the blurb but does have a festive reference in the title as it’s called We Three Queens .

And finally, it’s not really a series, but every Christmas the British Library Crime Classics series comes up with a new festive-themed book – this year it’s Dramatic Murder which came out last week and is by an author I hadn’t heard of – Elizabeth Anthony. The blurb says it was first published in 1948 and has been forgotten for 75 years so I’m pretty sure I’m not going to be the only one in that situation. It’s set at a Christmas party on a private island off the coast of Scotland where the host is found electrocuted and I think it sounds really promising. That’s your lot:

Happy Humpday