Get more of the holidays with The 19th Christmas

If you haven’t yet had a chance to pick up some more brozy mysteries, check out my blog from last week. Zachary Goldman and others await!

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme. Read the rules and more teasers at The Purple Booker. Anyone can play along.

On one hand, it seems like Christmas is just barely over, and on the other, it feels like it was ages ago. But luckily, I can read about Christmas all year long. This week I am reading James Patterson’s The 19th Christmas, another from the Women’s Murder Club series.

Patterson is always a solid choice for me, and with 9,000 people giving it an overall rating of 4.7 stars out of 5 on Amazon, I guess there are a lot of others who are of the same opinion.

In this case, Lindsay Boxer and her team are trying to run down a criminal before he manages to pull off the big Christmas Day heist that he has purportedly planned. Only they don’t know who he is or the target of the heist. Loman leads them on a merry chase, happily distracting them with one target after another, permanently disposing of his minions along the way so that they cannot give him away.

“The plan has many moving parts,” Loman said, “but if it goes off as designed, by this time next year, you, Julian, will be living the life you’ve only dreamed of.”

James Patterson, The 19th Christmas

As the holidays approach, Detective Lindsay Boxer and her friends in the Women’s Murder Club have much to celebrate. Crime is down. The medical examiner’s office is quiet. Even the courts are showing some Christmas spirit. And the news cycle is so slow that journalist Cindy Thomas is on assignment to tell a story about the true meaning of the season for San Francisco.

Then a fearsome criminal known only as “Loman” seizes control of the headlines. Solving crimes never happens on schedule, but as this criminal mastermind unleashes credible threats by the hour, the month of December is upended for the Women’s Murder Club. Avoiding tragedy is the only holiday miracle they seek.