Gifts for Readers

Books make great Christmas gifts (also Chanukah). I say this not only because I write books; there are few gifts that give so much entertainment for so little money.

Therefore I will recommend some favorites to you.

A good reference/advice book for mystery writers: Don’t Murder Your Mystery, by Chris Roerden. Terrific advice for the would-be-published, she also offers sound counsel for the experienced writer. Highly recommended.

For fun, I am dipping again into Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaimon’s Good Omens. The Apocalypse has never been funnier. The newest edition has a forward describing the authors’ encounters with some of the weird and ardent fans of this intelligent fantasy novel. I also recommend Gaimon alone and Pratchett’s Discworld series enthusiastically.

I’m not sure why, but I find Ngaio Marsh’s Overture to Death a comfort read. I get it out every few years and fall gratefully into its world for a few days – I read it slowly, savoring it. I like the locale and the characters, and the solution is perfect. My old copy was falling to pieces, literally, so I was glad to find a new issue of it at Once Upon A Crime mystery bookstore.

I feel the same way about Georgette Heyer’s Behold Here’s Poison. Though I dislike the sleuth, I like the other characters and the method of poisoning is brilliant. It and Overture are old, golden-age mysteries (1930s), and they give a glimpse into a world long-vanished as described by literate, gifted authors. (I love 1930s and 1940s movies for the same reason.)

Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond is wonderful -- a reasonable, accesible explanation for why Europe and Asia got so far ahead of the rest of the world in technology -- though the sequel to it is not.