About the Book
Book: Mabel and the Unholy Night (Mysteries of Medicine Spring Book Four)
Author: Susan Kimmel Wright
Genre: Cozy Mystery
Release date: November 5, 2024
Faithful dog Barnacle has run off into a snowstorm, disrupting Mabel’s fun outing at the Christmas tree farm. Things don’t improve much when he reappears…with a human skull.
Since Mabel moved into her late grandma’s house, the sleepy village of Medicine Spring has provided clean air, a close-knit community, and charming small-town shops. To her surprise, it’s also offered up several murders—and romance with a handsome private investigator. Now, Barnacle’s discovery plunges Mabel into the mystery surrounding a decades-old unsolved murder and the disappearance of her friend Nita’s great uncle.
Before Mabel, boyfriend John, and her friends can find answers and bring justice for Nita and her family, more complications develop. Incredibly, a sixty-year-old Christmas card arrives, bearing Mabel’s name and address and containing a plea for help. Are the mysteries related?
While Mabel tries to get to the bottom of these strange events, a second suspicious death casts suspicion on Nita. Can Mabel find the real killer in time? Or will her Christmas season end on an unholy night?
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About the Author
Susan Kimmel Wright began her life of mystery in childhood, with reading. That led to writing kids’ mysteries and eventually to Medicine Spring with Mabel. A longtime member of Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime, Susan’s also a prolific writer of personal experience stories, many for Chicken Soup for the Soul. She shares an 1875 farmhouse in southwestern PA with her husband, several dogs and cats, and an allegedly excessive stockpile of coffee and tea mugs.
More from Susan
Does Christmas make you nostalgic? In Mabel & the Unholy Night, fifty-year-old Mabel is observing her first Christmas in her late grandma’s house. As she sets out each fragile, vintage ornament, she feels that same familiar lump in her throat.
What we treasure may have to do with when we grew up. I love mid-century glass tree ornaments from Woolworth’s, ceramic elves stamped “Made in Japan,” and Gurley candles shaped like carolers, some still bearing 29¢ stickers on the base.
Ever since childhood, I’ve loved the tiny cardboard village under our tree. Houses and churches sparkled with glitter in their landscape of cotton-batting snow and bushes of dried moss. A sheet of glass atop light-blue construction paper made a perfect pond for tiny skaters. As someone once pointed out, accuracy of scale is of no concern in the cardboard village. Reindeer may loom over the houses like the mutant product of scientific experimentation gone wrong in a “B” horror movie.
Cardboard villages, properly called “putz houses,” originated with Moravian immigrants. Once handmade, houses were later imported from Germany and Japan. While nowadays we’re more likely to buy a ceramic village we can light up, I’ll take the primitive charm of a putz village any day.
Maybe best of all, we can build our own putz villages to suit ourselves. A new tradition for child and parent or grandparent might be building a new house each year, to add to the tiny community. While kits are available, you can also find plans online, such as this free resource: https://www.thesprucecrafts.com/make-traditional-glitter-houses-2365171
Perhaps our yearning for the things of the past is rooted in a longing for a more carefree time, when beloved faces, now gone, were still around us as we enjoyed the season together. When our slower-paced celebration centered on Christ’s birth, and family closeness. Building a putz house or church with loved ones might let us recapture just a bit of that old-fashioned Christmas spirit.
Blog Stops
Book Reviews From an Avid Reader, December 20
Babbling Becky L’s Book Impressions, December 21
A Reader’s Brain, December 22 (Author Interview)
Holly’s Book Corner, December 22
Locks, Hooks and Books, December 23
Fiction Book Lover, December 24 (Author Interview)
Guild Master, December 25 (Author Interview)
Debbie’s Dusty Deliberations, December 26
Texas Book-aholic, December 27
Back Porch Reads, December 28 (Author Interview)
Happily Managing a Household of Boys, December 28
Truth and Grace Homeschool Academy, December 29
A Modern Day Fairy Tale, December 30 (Author Interview)
Blogging With Carol, December 31
Lily’s Corner, January 1
Vicky Sluiter, January 2 (Author Interview)
Giveaway
To celebrate her tour, Susan is giving away the grand prize of a $50 Amazon gift card and a signed copy of the book!!
Be sure to comment on the blog stops for extra entries into the giveaway! Click the link below to enter.
http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/00adcf54124
My Review
Mabel and the Unholy Night is the fourth installment from Susan Kimmel Wright's Mysteries of Medicine Spring series. I have had the pleasure reading the previous books from the series and really enjoyed them. It was great to catch up with Mabel once again and being thrown into yet another mystery. This was a great suspense filled adventure to go on and I loved that it is centered around the most magical time of the year.
Five stars is what I am going to give Mabel and the Unholy Night. I highly recommend it for readers who love to read clean cozy mysteries. I hope there will be more books to come from the Mysteries of Medicine Spring series. I am not ready to say goodbye to Mabel and her pals.
I received a copy of Susan Kimmel Wright's Mabel and the Unholy Night from the publisher, but was not required to write a positive review. This review is one hundred percent my own honest opinion.
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