I'm still catching up with the books on my holiday reading pile, and Nero Blanc's A Crossworder's Holiday (#256) was a quick read. It's actually a collection of short stories, all with holiday themes, featuring the husband and wife team of Belle Graham and Rosco Polycrates. He's a former cop turned private investigator, she's the well-known editor of crossword puzzles for a local Massachusetts paper. Together, they solve mysteries that always include crosswords, both as a key to the crime and for the reader to solve along with Belle to find out the answer to what really happened in each case.
It's a novel approach, and a fast read if you do what I did and read the clues in the finished puzzles included at the back of the book instead of solving them for yourself. Other readers must have done the same, because I thought it was a Christmas miracle that in the eleven years the book has been in our library system, not one person so much as penciled in a single letter in any of the crossword grids!
Unlike many mysteries, not all these stories involved a murder; some were about theft or fraud, or in one case, even a long ago missing woman in England. All the stories did include descriptions of scrumptious holiday food, so best have a plate of Christmas cookies by your side when you sit down to read this collection!
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