Thirteen festive crime stories set in New York City’s beloved mystery bookstore The oldest mystery specialty bookstore in the world, The Mysterious Bookshop, has for most of its forty-five-year history commissioned an original short story as a holiday gift for its customers. Written exclusively for the store and never published elsewhere, the stories were given as a holiday gift to its customers as a thank you for their business, handed out or mailed between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day. The prompt for the story requires three that it be set at Christmastime, that it involve a crime of some kind, or the suspicion of one, and that it be set at least partially in the bookstore. And from these loose structural guidelines, diverse tales took flight. The thirteen tales included in this volume are among the finest to be produced in this annual tradition, sure to charm any reader looking for a holiday-themed escape. Included herein are the ingenious “Snowflake Time” by Laura Lippman; Lyndsay Faye’s tale of vengeance “A Midnight Clear”; the challenging brainteaser, “A Christmas Puzzle,” by Ragnar Jónasson; “Hester’s Gift,” an impossible crime story by Tom Mead; the suspenseful “The Christmas Party” by Jeffery Deaver; Thomas Perry’s hilarious comedy of errors, “Here We Come A-Wassailing;” and other tales appropriate for the season, collected and introduced by Otto Penzler. The result is, objectively speaking, the finest “stocking stuffer” that a mystery fan could hope to find.
Authors
Rob Hart is the author of THE PARADOX HOTEL. He also wrote THE WAREHOUSE, which has been sold in more than 20 countries and been optioned for film by Ron Howard, as well as the Ash McKenna crime series, the short story collection TAKE-OUT, and SCOTT FREE with James Patterson. His short stories have been published widely, including “Due on Batuu,” set in the Star Wars universe, which appeared in FROM A CERTAIN POINT OF VIEW: THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, and "Take-Out," which appeared in BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY STORIES 2018. He’s worked as a political reporter, the communications director for a politician, and a commissioner for the city of New York. He is the former publisher at MysteriousPress.com and the current class director at LitReactor. He lives in New York City.
Otto Penzler is an editor of mystery fiction in the United States, and proprietor of The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City, where he lives. Otto Penzler founded The Mysteriour Press in 1975 and was the publisher of The Armchair Detective, the Edgar-winning quarterly journal devoted to the study of mystery and suspense fiction, for seventeen years. Penzler has won two Edgar Awards, for The Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection in 1977, and The Lineup in 2010. The Mystery Writers of America awarded him the prestigious Ellery Queen Award in 1994, and the Raven—the group's highest non-writing award—in 2003.
Ragnar Jonasson is author of the award winning and international bestselling Dark Iceland series. His debut Snowblind, first in the Dark Iceland series, went to number one in the Amazon Kindle charts shortly after publication. The book was also a no. 1 Amazon Kindle bestseller in Australia. Snowblind has been a paperback bestseller in France. Nightblind won the Dead Good Reader Award 2016 for Most Captivating Crime in Translation. Snowblind was called a "classically crafted whodunit" by THE NEW YORK TIMES, and it was selected by The Independent as one of the best crime novels of 2015 in the UK. Rights to the Dark Iceland series have been sold to UK, USA, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, Australia, Poland, Turkey, South Korea, Japan, Morocco, Portugal, Croatia, Armenia and Iceland. Ragnar was born in Reykjavik, Iceland, where he works as a writer and a lawyer. He also teaches copyright law at Reykjavik University and has previously worked on radio and television, including as a TV-news reporter for the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service. He is also the co-founder of the Reykjavik international crime writing festival Iceland Noir. From the age of 17, Ragnar translated 14 Agatha Christie novels into Icelandic. Ragnar has also had short stories published internationally, including in the distinguished Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in the US, the first stories by an Icelandic author in that magazine. He has appeared on festival panels worldwide, and lives in Reykjavik.
Thomas Perry is the author of 25 novels. He was born in Tonawanda, New York in 1947. He received a B.A. from Cornell University in 1969 and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Rochester in 1974. He has worked as a park maintenance man, factory laborer, commercial fisherman, university administrator and teacher, and as a writer and producer of prime time network television shows. He lives in Southern California. His website is www.thomasperryauthor.com
