Finally: the perfect stocking stuffer for the crime fiction lover in your life! With a foreword by CWA Diamond Award-winner Peter Lovesey, these eighteen delightful holiday stories by your favorite Soho Crime authors contain laughs, murders, and plenty more.
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**This captivating collection, which features bestselling and award-winning authors, contains laughs aplenty, the most hardboiled of holiday noir, and heartwarming reminders of the spirit of the season.

Nine mall Santas must find the imposter among them. An elderly lady seeks peace from her murderously loud neighbors at Christmastime. A young woman receives a mysterious invitation to Christmas dinner with a stranger. Niccolò Machiavelli sets out to save an Italian city. Sherlock Holmes s one-time nemesis Irene Adler finds herself in an unexpected tangle in Paris while on a routine espionage assignment. Jane Austen searches for the Dowager Duchess of Wilborough s stolen diamonds. These and other adventures in this delectable volume will whisk readers away to Christmases around the globe, from a Korean War POW camp to a Copenhagen refugee squat, from a palatial hotel in 1920s Bombay to a crumbling mansion in Havana.

Includes Stories By (In Order of Appearance):
Helene Tursten, Mick Herron, Martin Limón, Timothy Hallinan, Teresa Dovalpage, Mette Ivie Harrison, Colin Cotterill, Ed Lin, Stuart Neville, Tod Goldberg, Henry Chang, James R. Benn, Lene Kaaberbøl & Agnete Friis, Sujata Massey, Gary Corby, Cara Black, Stephanie Barron and a Foreword and story by Peter Lovesey.

Autorentext

For more than twenty-five years, Soho Crime has been publishing atmospheric crime fiction set all over the world in places like France, China, England, Laos, Northern Ireland, Thailand, Australia, Japan, Germany, South Africa, Italy, Denmark, India, Cuba, and Palestine, to name a few. Lovers of crime fiction, whether it’s detective fiction, police procedurals, thrillers, espionage novels, revenge novels, stories of thieves, assassins, or underworld mob bosses—can count on an immersive adventure steeped in cultural detail. Visit www.sohocrime.com for a complete list of titles in the Soho Crime library.

Leseprobe
**An excerpt from the title story, The Usual Santas by Mick Herron

** Whiteoaks, the brochures explained, was more than a shopping center: it was a Day Out For The Whole Family; a Complete Retail Experience Under Just One Roof. It was an Ideally Situated Outlet Village an Ultra-Convenient Complex For The Ultra-Modern Consumer. It was where Quality met Design to form an Affordable Union. It might have been a Stately Pleasure Dome. It was possibly a Garden Of Earthly Delight. It was almost cer­tainly where Capital Letters went to Die.
More precisely, it was on the outskirts of one of Lon­don s northwest satellite towns, and, viewed from above, resembled a glass and steel rendering of a giant octopus dropped headfirst onto the landscape. In the gaps between its outstretched tentacles were parks and play areas and public conveniences, and at each of its two main entrances were garages offering, in addition to the usual services, full valet coverage, 4-wheel alignment and diagnostic analysis, as well as free air and a Last-Minute One-Stop-Shop. Cart stations colored pennants hoisted above them for swift location were positioned at those intervals market research had determined user-friendly, and were assiduously tended by liveried cart-jockeys. From ten minutes before dusk until ten after daybreak the area was bathed in gentle orange light, the quiet humming of CCTV cameras a constant reminder that your security was Whiteoaks concern. And in a hedged-off corner between the center s electricity substa­tion and one of four home-delivery loading bays perhaps the only point in the complex to which the word accessible did not apply lurked a furtive row of recycling bins, like a consumerist memento mori.
As for the interior, it was a contemporary cathedral, sacred to the pursuit of retail opportunity. There was a food mall, a clothing avenue, an entertainment hall; there were wings dedicated to white goods ( all your domestic requirements sat­isfied! ), pampering ( full body tan in minutes! ) and financial services ( consolidate your debts ask us how! ). There was a boulevard of sporting goods, a bridleway of gardening supplies; a veritable Hatton Garden of jewelers. No franchise ever heard of went unrepresented, and several never before encountered had multiple outlets. Whiteoaks delicatessens carried sweet­meats from as near as Abbotsbury and as far as Zywocice; its bookshops shelved volumes by every author its readers could imagine, from Bill Bryson to Jeremy Clarkson. The shopper who is tired of Whiteoaks, it might easily be asserted, is a shopper who is tired of credit. During the summer, light washed down from the recessed contours of its cantilevered ceilings, and during the winter it did exactly the same. Temperature, too, was regulated and constant, and in this it matched everything else. At Whiteoaks, you could buy raspberries in winter and tinsel in July. Seasonal variation was discouraged as an unnecessary brake on impulse purchasing.
Which was not to say that Whiteoaks ignored the pas­sage of the year; rather, it measured the months in a manner appropriate to its customers needs. As surely as Father s Day follows Mother s, as unalterably as Harry Potter gives way to the Great Pumpkin, time marches on; its inevitable progress registering as peaks and troughs in a never-ending flow chart.
For there are only seventeen Major Feasts in the calendar of the Complete Retail Experience.
And the greatest of these is Christmas.

At Whiteoaks Christmas slipped in slowly, sublimi­nally, with the faint rustle of a paperchain in early September, and the echo of a jingle bell as October turned. S