Two titles on a bookstore's web page for 2023 Christmas murder mysteries sent me to the public library. I had read S. J. Bennett's Windsor Knot, the first in her series about Queen Elizabeth II as a detective and enjoyed it enough to borrow Murder Most Royal as light Christmastime reading. My conclusion: not enough Corgis, but thumbs up to a mildly amusing visit to Sandringham for the holidays. For an interview with the author, click here.
Alas, thumbs down to Kate Carlisle's Twelve Books of Christmas (although I do like the retro, cozy jacket art by Dan Craig). I'm impatient with the kind of clichéd shorthand that turns out sentences like "My darkly handsome husband Derek quirked an eyebrow" (p. 1). There's no need to give genre fiction the benefit of the doubt, so back it went to the library in time for a reader with different tastes to give it a chance before Twelfth Night.