Over two years ago, I
first heard about The Empty Manger
by Bill Crider when Ben Boulden mentioned his 2008 review of the same over on
his Gravetapping
Blog. It wasn’t available via eBook or at my local library so Bill Crider
sent me a copy from his own personal library. I reviewed it here on the blog
late December 2014. I had planned to read the other novellas in the book and
still have not managed to do that. Life tended to laugh and interefer with my
plans on this and quite a number of other things. So it goes. Though I have not
managed to get the job done, my advice remains the same as it was then—if you can
get your hands on the book do so.
Make sure you head
over to Patti Abbott’s blog for
the rest of the FFB recommendations for this next to last Friday of 2016.
Sheriff Dan Rhodes can’t remember it ever snowing in
Blacklin County on Christmas. It certainly didn’t look like it would happen
this year with daytime temperatures in the upper 60’s and low 40’s at night.
Typical weather for the area residents of the county located in East Texas, but
not conducive to the postcard winter wonderland so many long for at this time
of year.
Like a lot of small Texan towns-- and
elsewhere for that matter-- the downtown area of Clearview has a number of
vacant buildings in various states of disrepair. Some of the vacant buildings
are in very bad shape. Shoppers were drawn away to the nearby Wal-Mart or one
of the big new grocery stores and local businesses closed leaving the buildings
to decay and rot. City council member Jerri Laxton had been pushing plans to
restore the grandeur of the downtown area.
One of her ideas was to get some of the
local high school students to paint a mural on one of the walls of a downtown
building. Some of the local religious leaders convinced all that in the spirit
of the season the mural should be of a manger with a brilliant star hanging
over it. Somebody else came up with the plan to have members of the local
Baptist congregation play the parts of Joseph, Mary, wise men, and the
shepherds with a doll standing in for the baby Jesus. After all, the risk with
a real baby as part of the outside scene would be too high.
It was a very good thing that a doll
was used because, according to Francis Blair, somebody stole baby Jesus. She is
very upset that somebody would do that. She might be more upset if she knew
there was a dead body in the alley behind the building.
While Rhodes never drinks a Dr.
Pepper----though he does talk about it---- and he never eats any crackers, he
does actively work the cases. Any Rhodes story is a good one and this one is no
exception. The novella The Empty Manger by Bill Crider is
well worth the effort to get your hands on the book, Murder, Mayhem, And Mistletoe. Crider’s
story is one of four novellas in the book that also contains works from Terence
Faherty, Aileen Schumacher, and Wendi Lee.
Murder, Mayhem And Mistletoe
Worldwide Library (Harlequin)
November 2001
ISBN# 0-373-26401-1
Paperback
390 Pages
$6.99
Material supplied by the author so that
I could read and review.
Kevin R. Tipple ©2014, 2016
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2 comments:
Top of my list for next Christmas!
And here we are at the next Christmas....
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