Customer Reviews

Ho-Ho Homicide (Benbow/Wingate Mystery)

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HO-HO HOMICIDE by Corinne Holt Sawyer was a favorite book to display in Christmas mysteries in my used bookstore, mainly mysteries, in a small South Carolina town.
I had met Corinne at a Sisters-In-Crime meeting in Greenville, SC in the late 1990's. At the time she had just retired from near-by Clemson University as Director of Special Projects. By the time I had collected enough of her books for signature, she had moved to California to be near her sister at Carlsbad-by-the-Sea (the retirement home that became Camden-sur-Mer in her senior sleuth cozy mysteries). We corresponded and she graciously signed a big box of books shipping them back and forth between coasts.

Sawyer wrote eight senior sleuth mysteries about Angela Benbow and Caldedonia Wingate, both widows of admirals. Ho-Ho Homicide is not the best in the series. It does concern a murder: the body is found under the Christmas tree. But it is interesting for where the setting really is---southern California! Here's some excerpts from the beginning paragraphs:

December had arrived in Southern California. Santa, swathed in red and sweating in his phony beard, appeared in front of every supermarket ringing his bell for contributions to the bucket which swung gently in warm breezes beneath drilled rows of royal palms. Thanks to the Chamber of Commerce, the light(s)...(of) main street were adorned with outsized red ribbons, flocked to look like velvet... the display windows of downtown shops..began to feature plastic evergreen, mounds of artificial snow, and drifts of cotton batting.
And the old luxury hotel, Camden-sur-Mer---now converted to a retirement home---had joined the spirit of the season with cutouts of snowflakes pasted to all the windows...a lobby decorated with unrelenting red and green. There were wreaths or swags of fake pine. Set up beyond the grand piano and filling the lobby...there was a giant tree---a real one---laded with ornaments and brilliant with colored lights. And in case the residents with failing short-term memory should forget what the season was, their ears were filled morning and evening with Christmas carols...

Ho-Ho Homicide (and a couple other senior sleuth titles) will make a great gift for your favorite great aunt or other elderly female relative who reads. It's an intelligent and rather witty Christmas mystery. No snow, no cold freezes, just fake stuff! But that's still a Christmas setting in Florida and California.