Rockin' Around the Chickadee by Donna Andrews, 280 pages

 Meg's sister-in-law, Delaney is pregnant. Since her due date is on or around Christmas Day, this is putting a bit of a damper on the usual holiday festivities. Meg and Michael are NOT hosting the usual house full of relatives and parties. Instead, Meg, along with her mother, her grandmother, her cousin Rose Noire, and her good friend Caroline, are militantly doing everything they can think of to keep Delaney quiet and healthy. All the relatives are farmed out to friends and neighbors; all the parties are being held somewhere else, and while Delaney is bored and mutinous, she's doing well, and they're managing to maintain a serene, peaceful environment for her . . . until a body is found in Meg and Michael's yard. Can Meg still keep Delaney calm in the middle of a murder investigation, all while trying to catch the killer?Full of her usual twists and turns, paired with relatable family holiday drama and Caerphilly’s traditional Christmas merriment, Donna Andrews brings readers another joyful classic.

Food at Sea: Shipboard Cuisine from Ancient to Modern Times by Stephen Spalding, 280 pages

 Food at Shipboard Cuisine from Ancient to Modern Times traces the preservation, preparation, and consumption of food at sea, over a period of several thousand years, and in a variety of cultures. The book traces the development of cooking aboard in ancient and medieval times, through the development of seafaring traditions of storing and preparing food on the world’s seas and oceans.

Following a largely chronological format, Simon Spalding shows how the raw materials, cooking and eating equipments, and methods of preparation of seafarers have both reflected the shoreside practices of their cultures, and differed from them. The economies of whole countries have developed around foods that could survive long trips by sea, and new technologies have evolved to expand the available food choices at sea.

Changes in ship construction and propulsion have compelled changes in food at sea, and Spalding’s book explores these changes in cargo ships, passenger ships, warships, and other types over the centuries in fascinating depth of detail. Selected passages from songs and poems, quotes from seafarers famous and obscure, and new insights into culinary history all add spice to the tale.

Colour Scheme by Ngaio Marsh, 280 pages

 Even down in New Zealand, war-fueled spy fever is running wild. Near the decaying sulphur springs of Colonel and Mrs. Claire, the strange lights and signals being sent to foreign ships at sea mean there's a spy in their midst. Soon an even darker sign appears--a health-seeker with untoward intentions meets his demise in the mud baths. And when a new arrival appears, one who possesses the cunning of a criminal and the insight of a psychologist, can Scotland Yard's Inspector Roderick Alleyn be far behind?

We Took to the Woods by Louise Dickinson Rich, 280 pages

 Between the time Louise Dickinson gave up wanting to be a brakeman on a freight train and definitely decided to become an English teacher, she would say when asked what she was going to do with her life that she was going to live alone in a cabin in the Maine woods and write. Years later when she received a letter from a friend exclaiming, "Isn't it wonderful that you're at last doing what you always wanted, " she realized with a start that she was living her old dream. "We Took To The Woods" is more than an adventure story, more than simple nature study; it portrays a cherished dream awakened into full life. Written with warmth and enthusiasm and great charm, it is a book to stir the imagination of every reader and kindle his heart with envy.

Save Room for Pie: Food Songs and Chewy Ruminations by Roy Blount Jr., 280 pages

 Our best-laid plans will yield to fate.

And we will say, “We lived. We ate.”

Roy Blount Jr. is one of America’s most cherished comic writers. He’s been compared to Mark Twain and James Thurber, and his books have been called everything from “a work of art” (Robert W. Creamer, The New York Times Book Review) to “a book to read till it falls apart” (Newsweek). Now, in Save Room for Pie, he applies his much-praised wit and charm to a rich and fundamental topic: food.

As a lifelong eater, Blount always got along easy with food—he didn’t have to think, he just ate. But food doesn’t exist in a vacuum; there’s the global climate and the global economy to consider, not to mention Blount’s chronic sinusitis, which constricts his sense of smell, and consequently his taste buds. So while he’s always frowned on eating with an ulterior motive, times have changed. Save Room for Pie grapples with these and other food-related questions in Blount’s signature style. Here you’ll find lively meditations on everything from bacon froth to grapefruit, Kobe beef to biscuits. You’ll also find defenses of gizzards, mullet, okra, cane syrup, watermelon, and boiled peanuts; an imagined dialogue between Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; input from Louis Armstrong, Frederick Douglass, and Blaze Starr; and of course some shampooed possums and carjacking turkeys.

In poems and songs, limericks and fake (or sometimes true) news stories, Blount talks about food in surprising and innovative ways, with all the wit and verve that prompted Garrison Keillor, in The Paris Review, to say: “Blount is the best. He can be literate, uncouth, and soulful all in one sentence.”

Canterberry Tales by C. P. Hoff, 280 pages

 Pull up your knee socks and buckle your pinchy shoes, your childhood is calling. Celia Canterberry, a precocious seven-year-old, hell bent on saving earthworms, is about to drag you down memory lane and remind you what it was like to look at a careworn world with wide-eyed bemusement. Now take a deep breath. Smell that? Nostalgia.

Celia flits through the streets of Happy Valley to her Nan's chagrin, causing havoc wherever she goes. She's so infamous, she's got her own comic strip in the local paper, and Old Lady Griggs, her babysitter, is only too happy to read it with her. But what Celia secretly wants to know is where she came from. You see, Celia was abandoned at the hospital by her should-have-been parents, and her Nan won't explain how or why...

Be My Ghost by Carol J. Perry, 280 pages

 Maureen's career as a sportswear buyer hits a snag just before Halloween, when the department store declares bankruptcy. Meanwhile, Finn's lost his way as a guide dog after flunking his test for being too friendly and easily distracted. Sadly, only one of them can earn unemployment, so Maureen's facing a winter of discontent in Boston--when she realizes she can't afford her apartment.

Salvation comes when she receives a mysterious inheritance: an inn in Haven, Florida. A quaint, scenic town on the Gulf of Mexico hidden away from the theme parks, Maureen believes it's a good place to make a fresh start with a new business venture. But she gets more than she bargained for when she finds a dead body on her property--and meets some of the inn's everlasting tenants in the form of ghosts who offer their otherworldly talents in order to help her solve the mystery...

Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey, 280 pages

 The great American Western novelist presents his all-time classic story. Even the wild purple wasteland falls into jeopardy when a gunman named Lassiter and a rich homesteader named Jane Witherspoon join forces--and fates--to take on an entire violent town.

Good Mourning: A Memoir by Elizabeth Meyer, 280 pages

 In this funny, insightful memoir, a young socialite risks social suicide when she takes a job at a legendary funeral chapel on New York Citys Upper East Side.Good Mourning offers a behind-the-scenes look at one of the most famous funeral homes in the country where not even big money can protect you from the universal experience of grieving.

It's Gossip Girl meets Six Feet Under, told from the unique perspective of a fashionista turned funeral planner.

Elizabeth Meyer stumbled upon a career in the midst of planning her own father's funeral, which she turned into an upbeat party with Rolling Stones music, thousands of dollars worth of her mother's favorite flowers, and a personalized eulogy. Starting out as a receptionist, Meyer quickly found she had a knack for helping people cope with their grief, as well as creating fitting send-offs for some of the city's most high-powered residents.
Meyer has seen it all: two women who found out their deceased husband (yes, singular) was living a double life, a famous corpse with a missing brain, and funerals that cost more than most weddings. By turns illuminating, emotional, and darkly humorous, Good Mourning is a lesson in how the human heart grieves and grows, whether you're wearing this season's couture or drug-store flip-flops.

Chic Young's Blondie: Daily Comics, Volume 1, 1930-1933, 280 pages

 Celebrating Blondie's 80th anniversary, IDW's Library of American Comics presents Blondie like you've never seen her before! This book collects the early strips by Chic Young for the first time ever, beginning with the first ones from October 1930. Blondie Boopadoop is a light-headed flapper who meets Dagwood Bumstead, the heir to a wealthy, high society fortune. Dagwood's parents are aghast and refuse him permission to marry the blonde, but their son is in love. He and Blondie hatch a scheme - the voracious Dagwood goes on a hunger strike for 28 days, 7 hours, 8 minutes, and 22 seconds. This first volume chronicles the amazing and hilarious courtship, and concludes with the spectacular wedding in February 1933.

Murder in the Corn Maze by G.A. McKevett, 280 pages

The roots of the Moonlight Magnolia Detective Agency reach back to the 1980s in the little town of McGill, Georgia—where Stella Reid and her seven grandkids enjoy some spooky Halloween fun and stumble into murder . . .

It doesn’t take cash, just some good old-fashioned creativity, to turn a pillowcase into a ghost costume or a trashcan into a suit of armor. So even if she has to stick to a budget, Stella Reid always makes holidays like Halloween memorable for twelve-year-old Savannah and the rest of her grandchildren.

After joining the other townspeople for trick-or-treating and the annual parade down Main Street, Granny Reid and the kids head to Judge Patterson’s antebellum mansion, where a corn maze awaits. Most of the youngsters are too terrified to make it all the way to the middle. It’s lucky for them, because when Savannah and Granny get there, it proves to be even scarier than they expected—half buried in the mud at the center of the maze lies a human skull.

The grisly discovery uncovers a mystery that stretches back decades—and seems to be related to the long-unsolved murder of Granny Reid’s own part-Cherokee mother. After all this time, the culprit may be long gone . . . or still hiding among them. It’ll be up to Granny to dig into this Southern town’s history and a mess of old family secrets .

Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? by Edward Gorman, 280 pages

Local Iowans and the national press corps crowd the front yard of Roswell Garst's farmhouse in Black River Falls. Gathered this Monday in September 1959 for the much-publicized visit of Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, many brandish signs shouting BETTER DEAD THAN RED. The next day that slogan assumes a prophetic truth for Richard Conners, a high-profile leftist political writer. He turns up dead at the office of fledgling lawyer and private investigator Sam McCain with a hammer and sickle painted on his forehead. Everyone surmises Conners was killed for his politics...but McCain is not so sure.
This isn't my favorite series, but isn't bad. I think what I find off-putting is how much the author wants you to know when it took place because every page seems to have some pop culture reference from that time or such. I get it, Elvis was a singer at that time, let it go!

Head Lopper by Andrew Maclean, 280 pages

This is one I only read for Comics and Cocktails. Not my favorite.

Perfection Salad by Laura Shapiro, 280 pages

A look at the rise of domestic science at the end of the 1800s and beginning of 1900s. A little dry, but informative.

Pushing Up Daisies by M.C. Beaton, 280 pages

I think Agatha Raisin might be one of my favorite literary characters. I enjoy the fact that she isn't perfect, she manages to delude herself in the name of love, but will pull herself back and look at life with candid eyes, only to fall back into the chase of love. This is a series that you need to read from the beginning to truly appreciate the character development by the author.

A Mourning Wedding by Carola Dunn, 280 pages

These are such fun mysteries, even when you need a scorecard to keep track of all the family members.

Torso by Brian Michael Bendis and Marc Andreyko, 280 pages

The pick for this month's Comics and Cocktails book club. Based on a series of murders in Cleveland in the 1930s. The artwork was very hard to read and follow. Not my favorite one so far.

French Pastry Murder by Leslie Meier, 280 pages

Another case of murder following Lucy Stone. The cops really ought to just have someone follow her around, as many bodies as she stumbles over. I would think twice about hanging out with her socially.

Dead End Gene Pool by Wendy Burden, 280 pages

Boy, the problems rich people have.

SVU He's Watching You by Laurie John, 280 pages

Another super thriller from Sweet Valley University. It's not safe to hang out with Jessica or Elizabeth.