Score: 3.5/5 Bookmarks

Thank you to Minotaur for gifting me a review copy of The Gift of the Magpie by Donna Andrews. This is number 28 in the Meg Langslow series.

I don’t know about you, but I’m ready for ALL the holiday joy already, which includes decorating early, listening to holiday music, and reading all the holiday books I can get my hands on! This cozy mystery moved a little slow for me, but it definitely got me in a festive mood.

Meg is running Caerphilly’s Helping Hands for the Holidays Project, and coordinating volunteers to help people with projects they can’t do themselves (either physically or financially). I won’t spoil the story, but there are several mysteries that present themselves and are in need of solving.

There is a lot of detail about the various projects the Helping Hands crew are working on, some of which I didn’t think was 100% necessary or relevant to the story. It wasn’t until close to the halfway point when the main mystery really surfaced.

Despite being number 28 I thought the Gift of the Magpie worked pretty well as a stand-alone book. However, I do think I’d have had a better sense of the town, and the characters if I had read the other books first. I liked the characters well enough but I didn’t really feel like I knew them through this book alone. For example, it wasn’t entirely clear to me who Meg really was, what she did, and why she was so involved in solving mysteries, instead of leaving it to the police. I wanted a more plausible excuse for her to be doing what she was doing.

There are certainly a lot of different storylines to keep you guessing though, and it had the feeling of an Agatha Christie mystery in a lot of ways.

When looking up the other books in the series I couldn’t help but chuckle at some of the names. I’m a sucker for a good pun or any wordplay really, and a few of my favorites included Six Geese A-Slaying, The Hen of the Baskervilles, Duck the Halls, Lord of the Wings, and The Nightingale Before Christmas.

Synopsis:

The 28th book and the seventh Christmas mystery in the Meg Langslow series, The Gift of the Magpie is yet another wonderfully merry and funny book from New York Times bestselling author Donna Andrews.

Meg’s running Caerphilly’s Helping Hands for the Holidays project, in which neighbors help each other with things they can’t do and can’t afford to have done. Her hopes for a relatively peaceful (if busy) Christmas vanish when someone murders Harvey the Hoarder, whose house the Helping Hands were decluttering. Was there any truth to the rumor that he had something valuable hidden beneath all his junk? Was one of his friends, neighbors, or relatives greedy enough to murder him for the rumored treasure? And what about the magpie that has been bringing her family bits of tinsel and costume jewelry—does the bird’s latest gift hold a clue to solving the crime?

Full of intrigue, this Christmas mystery will take readers home to Caerphilly, where the suspense falls as thick as the snow.