Christmas Crimes at the Mysterious Bookshop

Penzler (editor of Golden Age Detective Stories) opened the doors of his famous Mysterious Bookstore on a Friday the 13th in April 1979, behind New York City’s Carnegie Hall. It’s still around 45 years later, now relocated to Lower Manhattan. In the 1990s, he began commissioning a different writer every year to write a Christmas mystery, some of whose action would take place in the bookshop. Penzler published the stories as booklets that he gave to customers as a present. In this collection, the second gathering of these Christmas season tales, Loren D. Estleman offers up a hilarious Nero Wolfe parody, Jeffery Deaver gleefully details the turning of tables on relatives plotting to dispose of their ailing uncle, and Thomas Perry traces the path of an exorbitantly expensive bottle of cognac whose successive owners sample it, then top it up with something else, reseal it, and pass it on to a new owner. In his lighthearted introduction, Penzler cautions that, although a character with his name appears in some of the stories, any resemblance is pure fiction.