Mistletoe Murder by Leslie Meier (Lucy Stone Mysteries, #1) * * * *
Mistletoe Murder by Leslie Meier is a small-town Christmas mystery . First published in 1991, it comes from a world without mobile phones , and that matters more than you might expect. There are moments where the modern reader instinctively thinks, just call someone, just text, just check, only to remember that none of that exists yet. I experienced this as an audiobook, and unfortunately that had a noticeable impact on my enjoyment. The narration is by Karen White , and it is not very good. At first I genuinely wondered whether I was listening to a poorly edited AI recording, because the delivery is full of awkward pauses in the middle of sentences. Words are separated strangely, and then I realised the narrator just had to jump to the next line on the page, resulting in readings like blue… sweater. The rhythm never quite settles, and it repeatedly pulls you out of the story. That issue is compounded by a recurring structural choice in the book itself. Each chapter opens with a...