This holiday season my loved ones came through once again, gracing me with a delightful assortment of books with which to ring in the new year.

I revel in unwrapping every telltale square gift, the only suspense being the sort of book I’ll find.  Fiction or non? Mystery or history? Novels or short story collections? I love them all and am grateful to the family and friends who seek out titles they know I’ll enjoy.

Taking it from the top, here’s a summary of this year’s wonderful book haul:

Brenda’s holiday books

The Best American Mystery and Suspense Anthology, edited this year by Lisa Unger in conjunction with series editor Steph Cha. The 20-author lineup is rich with superb writers, and I look so forward to a long-afternoon immersed in stories by S.A. Cosby, Margaret Randall, Leigh Newman, Joseph S. Walker, the always great Walter Mosley, and more.

Happiness is A Warm Gun: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of the Beatles, edited by Josh Pachter, is an anthology I’ve been particularly eager to read. Brilliantly conceived, it contains seventeen stories, each using as a jumping off point a Beatles song from one of the seventeen studio albums released by the Fab Four between 1964-1970. Friends Kristopher Zgorski and Dru Ann Love, known to many of us as talented and hardworking reviewers of crime fiction, wrote a story called “Ticket To Ride” from the Help! (1965). I turned to it as soon as I opened the book and was so darned impressed by their collaborative debut.  Great story, Kris and Dru Ann!

the wren, the wren by the estimable Anne Enright, is about three generations of women scarred by an arrogant, self-reverential poet who leaves Ireland to seek fame in America, leaving them bruised and reeling in his wake. Their mutual connection and love for one another is the focus, not his careless cruelty. Having heard so much praise for this book, and having loved Enright’s 2015 novel The Green Road, I cannot wait to read it.

This Other Eden by Paul Harding, a finalist for the National Book Award, is about fictional Apple Island, based on a real island off Phippsburg. Malaga Island was home to a multi-racial fishing community from the late 1700s until 1912, when its residents were forcibly removed by the State of Maine as the eugenics movement took hold. While praised by many, Harding’s  novel has been criticized by others for incorporating into his novel the same powerful, despicable lies that were told about the real-life residents of Malaga Island to justify the state’s brutal action.  I don’t expect The Other Eden to be an easy read, but I look forward to it, and feel sure it will lead me to other books about the tragic history of real-life Malaga Island.

The Plinko Bounce by Martin Clark is about a public defender in rural Virginia assigned to defend a violent career criminal charged with murdering a wealthy businesswoman. Technicalities offer the lawyer a way to get his client acquitted, but it sounds to me that this novel is going to be about when a win isn’t really a win.  My current WIP is about a criminal defense lawyer here in Maine who is often faced with ethical dilemmas, so I’m especially keen to read this one.

The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon is a novel inspired by Martha Ballard, the Maine midwife whose quiet, dogged heroism was illuminated by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich in A Midwife’s Tale, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1991.  In this historical novel, Lawhon imagines Martha Ballard investigating a terrible crime during the winter of 1789, when the Kennebec River is frozen, and secrets (and evidence) lie under the ice. I loved A Midwife’s Tale, and feel sure I’ll need an entire weekend to read this novel.  The challenge will be not to speed through it, because an early peek left no doubt that Lawhon’s prose is beautiful.

Dark Hollow and The Woman in the Woods are two thrillers in John Connolly’s Maine-set Charlie Parker series I’ve not read. He’s a master at keeping his readers up deep into the night, and winter is the perfect time for that, no?  I hope we get a good snowstorm soon so I can dig in to these novels before digging out the walkways.

Time of Wonder, written and illustrated by the amazing Robert McCloskey.  Last Christmas I received new versions of One Morning in Maine and Burt Dow, Deep-water Man, so a McCloskey for Christmas is something of a tradition. I so enjoyed last summer’s McCloskey exhibition at Curtis Memorial Library in Brunswick (read more about that here: https://mainecrimewriters.com/2023/10/05/hanging-out-with-imagined-friends/

VEG-TABLE is a marvelous vegetarian cookbook gifted by a niece who also is a big fan of creative vegetable cookery. I’ve perused it already, and yep, it’s going to be a fun way to eat healthy in the new year (which we’re all trying to do, right?)

In summary, once again I’ve been blessed with book riches, and I’m filled with gratitude for those who keep me entertained, challenged and inspired.

Happy reading in 2024, everyone!  Commenters, what books did you receive as holiday gifts?

Brenda Buchanan sets her novels in and around Portland. Her three-book Joe Gale series features a contemporary newspaper reporter with old-school style who covers the courts and crime beat at the fictional Portland Daily Chronicle. An attorney since 1990, Brenda currently is writing a series about a criminal defense lawyer who takes on cases others won’t touch in the hometown to which she swore she’d never return. Brenda’s short story, “Means, Motive, and Opportunity,” was in the anthology Bloodroot: Best New England Crime Stories 2021 and received an honorable mention in Best American Mystery and Suspense 2022. Her story Assumptions Can Get You Killed appears in Wolfsbane: Best New England Crime Stories 2023.