Winter 2024 TBR Recap

Brook and Sarah open the next season of episodes by discussing what they read and watched over the 2024 holiday break.

Discussed and mentioned

Death of a Christmas Tree Salesman (2023) Patricia Meredith

The Christmas Murder Game (2022) Alexandra Benedict

“The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding” (1923) Agatha Christie

Man on the Inside (2024) Netflix series

The Last Word (2024) Elly Griffiths

Such Charming Liars (2024) Karen M. McManus

Strangers on a Train (1950) Patricia Highsmith

Black Doves (2024) Netflix series

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Transcript

This transcript is generated by a computer and there may be some mis-spellings and strange punctuation. We try to catch these before posting, but some things slip through.

Sarah	Welcome to Clued in Mystery. I’m Sarah.
Brook	And I’m Brook, and we both love mystery.
Sarah	Hi, Brook.
Brook	Hi, Sarah. It’s so good to be back recording with you again.
Sarah	Yeah, after a little holiday break, it’s so nice to start to slip back into routine.
Brook	Exactly. And we get to talk about what we read over our break. So, books and friends, and this is going to just be so much fun.
Brook	So I’ll get started. And ah if you listened to the previous episode where we discussed what we were planning to read, you’ll remember that I chose all holiday themed books. And, so the first one that I read was Death of a Christmas Tree Salesman. This is by our friend Patricia Meredith, and I just found this to be completely delightful. She says in the description that there are enough Christmas puns within the story to choke a reindeer, and um she was not kidding. But they were great, and I laughed out loud so many times. So, in this story, we have Sam Shovel.
Brook	Not Sam Spade, but Sam Shovel, is the noir-style fedora-wearing snowman who must solve the mystery of ah who killed O. Tannenbaum, the Christmas tree supplier. And Patricia’s husband Andrew narrates the audiobook, and and that’s what what I listened to. And I was so impressed.
Brook	He had different accents and nuances for each character, and he’s very talented. It it was it was fantastic. Patricia did release another story in the Sam Shovel series this year. It’s like Frosty. He comes back each each Christmas.
Sarah	Brook, that sounds so good and I’ve read the description for the book a few times and it only just occurred to me Sam Shovel Sam Spade.
Brook	I know, I know I was a little ways in and you know, he this character, you know, talks like that kind of a of a character from one of the noir movies, you know, and it finally dawned on me. OK, we’ve got Sam Shovel here. It was very cute.
Sarah	It sounds It sounds like so much fun, and um I’m so glad that you enjoyed it. And so if people recall what my list didn’t include any Christmas books, but I did have a Christmas show, which ah I’ll talk about later. And I did feel a little bit, you know, after we talked ah last, Brook, I felt a little bit maybe Scrooge-like because I didn’t have any Christmas books and I was hoping to get a Christmas book in and I just ah just didn’t have time.
Sarah	So I had to stick to the list that that we’d talked about before and so I will start by talking about The Last Word by Elly Griffiths and this was a 2024 release from her and I just love her easy writing style and I think this is the fourth book in I think it’s a loose series featuring uh the same recurring characters some of them are featured more or less depending on the book um. And i think Brook when you and i talked about are the the things that we were hoping to read over the holiday season
Sarah	You mentioned wondering why you haven’t read more of Elly Griffiths, and I wonder the same thing. I find the books in this series are such a delight. And I really do like that a couple of books feature these group of friends who are the main investigators and a couple of the other books feature their police detective friend Harbinder Kaur and I like that there’s some flexibility in terms of the way that she’s just created this this world that you’re not always getting that same point of view in each of the books. So, I do hope that there’s another in this series at some point, um but yeah, I really enjoyed it.
Brook	Yeah, I would agree with that. I like that you said it’s a loose series. That’s a good way to describe it. And it’s really clever. And in some ways it kind of breaks the rules that they tell us as authors, doesn’t it? That it’s not this very strict and structured series, but it’s, um I agree. I enjoy it very much. And you, you know, you feel like you’re getting to know the different characters.
Brook	So the next one I’ll mention is a short story. I read “The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding”. This is an Agatha Christie from 1923. It originally was ah published in The Sketch Magazine. And I mean, you really can’t go wrong with a Christie at Christmas. It was very good. This is a Poirot mystery. He gets called in to ah apprehended jewel thief.
Brook	And so we have a mystery without murder, so that’s very, you know, holiday and a little bit more romantic and atmospheric. And one thing I loved about this story is the way that the a culprit was caught, just one variable, one thing happens to kind of foil their plan and it reveals who the culprit is and I think that’s so fun when a mystery does that where the plan of the bad guy just goes just a little bit awry and it opens up the door for the detective to apprehend them. So, it’s a winner.
Sarah	I read that a while ago and um thought I might have been able to squeeze it in over all of the kind of wildness that happens over the holidays. And maybe I’ll have to save that for next year, Brook, to reread it.
Sarah	So the next that I’m going to talk about is another 2024 release, and this is Such Charming Liars by Karen M. McManus. This is a YA, and you know very typical of Karen McManus’ style. I have enjoyed all of the books that I’ve read, and this is the same for for this book. And I think actually it might have been my favorite of her books.
Sarah	There’s a death, so I can’t say that it’s a mystery without murder, but the book is far more focused on a heist rather than the murder. So, it was ah ah you know a little lighter, there’s humor, and yeah, I really enjoyed it.
Brook	That’s great. That is an author, one of those that I have not read yet. So I need to put that on a future list. And the last book that I had on my list was probably my favorite read of the winter break, and that was The Christmas Murder Game. This is a 2022 release by Alexandra Benedict, and I just really enjoyed this book. It had all the things that I like. We have family secrets and a big old house, a contested will that has a contrived treasure hunt between the cousins to determine who will get to inherit it. It was just really well done. It has an excellent twist that I did see coming, but it was still fun when the when the reveal happened. Um I will definitely read more. I would like to read more. I think that she has other holiday themed ah mysteries. So I look forward to those in future years.
Sarah	So I think I actually have read that book.
Brook	I think, I think you mentioned that you had
Sarah	But I didn’t realize that she’s got other holiday-themed mysteries. So I would I think I enjoyed it when I when I read it. It would have been a couple of years ago. But ah I would I would also read another by by her. So the last book that I had on my list was Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train. And this was released in 1950, but it really didn’t read like it was written 75 years ago. It’s well-paced, well-plotted, and I think largely stands up. And really, you know I think I mentioned this when but in the first episode about these. She’s like the OG suspense writer. And so it was it was really interesting just to read that and think about the impact that she has had on the genre. Because there’s lots of conventions in her book that um you know we see continue to appear in in books that are written now.
Brook	Absolutely. Yeah. And I think I mentioned in the original episode about our TBR list is that I really love this movie, the Alfred Hitchcock rendition, but I have never read the book. So I’m so glad to hear that it holds up and that’s really exciting.
Brook	So we also included a show that we intended to watch over break. And my pick was Man on the Inside. And this is a Netflix eight-episode series featuring Ted Danson as a widow who gets placed in a retirement community in order to solve a mystery. And um I did enjoy it. I actually haven’t finished the entire series, but I did enjoy it. But I feel like it’s more of a sitcom than an actual mystery. And um you know the situation that’s created is that this older gentleman is is placed inside the retirement center. It gives them the opportunity for this for the jokes and the character development and things like that.
Brook	There wasn’t a lot of investigating but what I thought was interesting was the way that mystery is so popular right now and it is obviously even influencing the shows that are made that maybe aren’t you know straight up mysteries, the you know the sitcoms, the um the dramas, the different things that we’re all being watching and being entertained by is having this influence because there was sort of this Richard Osman you know nod within within the show. um And I think that you watched some of this too, didn’t you Sarah?
Sarah	I did. That’s right, Brook. And yeah, I don’t think we finished the series yet, but um I felt very similarly to you in that it wasn’t so much a mystery. ah There was definitely a storyline that featured a mystery, but it wasn’t It wasn’t driving the story. It was really about you know this man and and um his experience, I think largely with grief, right as he’s still um finding his way after having lost his wife of many years.
Brook	Mm hmm. Yes.
Sarah	But it was it was good. It’s it’s sweet and an easy way to pass to pass a couple of evenings.
Brook	Mm hmm. Absolutely.
Sarah	So the pick that I had to watch is also from Netflix and this is Black Doves. And I would say it’s, you know, it it was billed as being a Christmas action thriller and it it is Christmasy in the way that Die Hard is Christmasy because it’s set around the holidays. But it’s really not um It is not a uplifting story at all. But I did like it. It’s six hour-long episodes and the storytelling moves between finding out how Keira Knightley’s character becomes a Black Dove ah and how past events influence past events influence the present um where she is you know married to a high ranking member of the ah British government, and she’s been passing information along to another organization.
Sarah	I really did enjoy it. I did find it a little bit harder to tell if it was ah like a flashback scene because Ben Whishaw, who’s the other kind of star character in the show, I didn’t find like his character looked that different between the past and the present. And so sometimes I was like, oh, is this happening now or is he remembering something? um But it was, i I did like it and it, there’s ah lots of guns and lots of shooting. So if that’s if that’s not your thing and it may not be everybody’s thing at Christmas, um it it may not be for you.
Brook	Exactly. Well, it sounds great. And I kind of have that on my radar for something to watch this winter as well.
Sarah	Well, Brook, it was so fun to hear about what you read over the holiday season. And this always makes me excited because it means that we are starting our next season of this show and it’s so fun to read and watch and talk about mystery with you.
Brook	I know. I’m looking forward to it. And everyone, we have such a great lineup of new episodes coming up. We’re just really excited to get planning and to get to recording. And we hope that you’ll join us. But for today, thank you for being here on Clued in Mystery. I’m Brook.
Sarah	And I’m Sarah, and we both love mystery.