Hello everyone.
Are you getting ready for Halloween? We get swamped with trick or treaters. How many kids do you get, 20, 100? Amateurs! We get over one thousand kids. No, I'm not kidding. Our street is in the middle of a small town. Because of its location the road is closed, allowing the kids to wander without fear of being run over. The police even walk around and the city encourages children to come to our street for trick or treating fun. Hmmm, maybe the city ought to be kicking in for candy! I might skip giving out candy, but hubby loves it. I pretty much stay inside watching spooky movies while he attends to lines of kids waiting for sugary loot. I used to buy, stuff, and tie with ribbon eight hundred cellophane bags and we would run out by 7pm. Finally we resorting to just shoveling lose candy into plastic pumpkins and borrowed pillow cases.
The last few years have slowed down a bit. A few years ago we did the whole decoration thing, complete with organza ghosts in windows, strobe light on the third floor and fog machine hidden by our front stairs. Our neighbors were masters, one invited kids into the entry way of their large Victorian house. The foyer had spooky lighting, huge moving spider and an animatronic butler that would scare the pageebees out of the kids. One year another neighbor had a two story pirate ship in his front yard. He was a builder so it was very elaborate; wood, with sails, a plank, the works. Naturally it was the Black Pearl from the Pirates of the Caribbean movie. They got their whole extended family together and each dressed with elaborate costumes and masks as a character from the movie. It actually made the front page of the newspaper. There was no competing with that, so we ditched the decorations and just passed out candy. Now our Halloween crazy neighbors have all moved but we've lost our will to spook kids. Maybe because we go overboard at Christmas which seems to be approaching way too quickly.
I recently read Haunted House Murder, a collection of three short stories by Leslie Meier, Lee Hollis, and Barbara Ross. Each story is a nice length, approximately one hundred pages. This was the first dipping my toe into "cozy" mysteries. These category of books is more tame than a thriller, there is a mystery, but not a lot of gore or violence. They usually have a cute title, sometimes rhyming and normally have a colorful, illustrated cover. These books have gotten so popular I thought perhaps they would make a nice break between my beloved thrillers. Sometimes when I read endless thrillers I find myself becoming a little jaded as they all start to sound the same. I don't want my favorite genre to be like that, so I have been trying to sprinkle other kinder, gentler titles in my reading list. So far it's working, thrillers suddenly seem extra thrilling...who wouldn't want that? So, the Haunted House Murder was a much slower pace, no frantic page flipping. Yet, it was actually very enjoyable. All three of these stories have nicely developed characters, somewhat surprising considering each author did not get to contribute a full length novel. I found that I looked forward to reading this and although embarrassing I can happily report I didn't figure out any of the mysteries. I kind of thought reading a "cozy" mystery would be like drinking coffee that was too weak, but it was nice. One thing that is really interesting is that this kind of book often comes out for holidays, there are many Halloween volumes out now and lots for Christmas. In addition, they often feature someplace neat like a bed and breakfast, or library, or country store with locations like Salem or Cape Cod. Now I've only read one, but I've already purchased way too many....I can't resist the names and covers...these aren't complex stories just plain old fun, nice, light reading. I bet they can be addictive.
On a housewife note, no, our contractor still has not fixed our hurricane Dorian damage. We've had way too much rain and he is super busy. For right now, I will NOT be reading any cutesy cozy about a home repair mystery. I'm living it and it is not cute or cozy!
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