I made the mistake, earlier this year, of not planning ahead, and reviewed one of Jane Haddam’s December holiday books out of season. Shame on me. She wrote a second Christmas book, I believe, but I can’t find it on my shelves. I have a feeling that it may have been a casualty of The Flood so many years ago.

What’s interesting about Jane Haddam’s books is that you never see them any more. They’re not on the shelves in stores, you don’t see them recommended in eStores, I never see them in used book stores or at book sales – my theory is that people enjoy them so much that they hold onto them forever.

This one is, of course, Hanukkah-themed. Vaguely. All of her holiday mysteries are vaguely holiday-themed. Set in the 1990s, this one deals with a lot of familiar themes: far-right groups spray-painting synagogues; other bigots attacking undocumented immigrants; entitled white people feeling like they’ve been excluded from good jobs that have gone to people from other countries; police discriminating against immigrants; violence in big-city schools and around big-city hospitals.

It all feels so familiar – and then you’re brought up short when an FBI agent tells Gregor Demarkian that he’s been trying to get ahold of him all day, but Demarkian hasn’t been home to answer his phone. Or when a character is accused of being disloyal to her organization because she left her beeper at the office and her boss couldn’t page her in the middle of the night. Or when they introduce one of the characters by saying that she is sitting in bed, reading a Dorothy Cannell mystery.¹ Or the fact that the book centers around the production of one of those daytime talk shows of the Dr Ruth-Sally Jesse-Donahue-Maury type, that caused so many divorces by featuring people with crazy ideas about sex pitted against unsuspecting spouses, and such.²

Well, at some point, these things will stop feeling “dated” and will start feeling quaintly historic like the Miss Silver mysteries set in London during a London fog caused by coal smog or like snowy holiday mysteries in the Northeast. I wonder how long that will take.

The story starts in New York, in the early morning hours. The producer of the show is stalking through the halls of the production office and studio, trying to figure out where her team is. She’s been calling them from home and, once she gets there, from her office, trying to get them to come in at 3 a.m. because the airline canceled the flight of the sexually incompatible conjoined twins who are supposed to appear on that morning’s show, and they need to put Plan B into effect.³ Significantly missing in action is the talent coordinator, who isn’t answering her phone or responding to her beeper. The coordinator’s assistant shows up, precisely 5 minutes after her boyfriend, the lighting engineer, but the legal release forms she had carefully prepared ahead of time have disappeared, perhaps removed by her boss for some reason – but actually, secretly destroyed by a secretary, a bitch of a woman who graduated from Barnard and thinks that entitles her to the talent coordinator’s job. Luckily the talented set designer is there to figure out how to adjust the set, and her handsome young Portuguese assistant is there to do the heavy lifting.

As the dawn approaches, it looks like the show is coming together – and then the Talent Coordinator’s body suddenly shows up in a storage closet that people have been going in and out of all morning. The NYPD is stumped and keep trying to write it off as a mugging gone wrong (in a storage closet?) even though the woman’s apartment has been thoroughly trashed.

And all this right before show goes on the road for their annual tour, starting in Philadelphia, home of Gregor Demarkian, whom they are trying to get to come on the show to talk about sex and serial killers – with, surprise!, a serial killer sitting across from him providing another perspective. Unfortunately that taping goes awry when the handsome Portuguese furniture-mover is found dead in the men’s room. And now Demarkian has to get involved, much to his disgust.

And why do they keep finding Israeli dreidels around the bodies?

Woven in to all this are a variety of cozy subplots, including how to apprehend the white supremacists spray-painting hate on local synagogues; how to persuade a new immigrant, an elderly Armenian lady, to trust Demarkian and his friend, an Armenian priest, enough to allow her teenaged granddaughter to accept a “scholarship” to a private school so that she stops getting held up at knifepoint for her lunch money in the public school hallways; and what to do about Demarkian’s not-quite-girlfriend (with whom he spends more hours per day than most spouses do, all plutonic) who is beating herself up about her sister’s death row sentencing⁴.

Fear not. All the plots come together in the end.

I have to admit, I left this book on the shelf for a long time, feeling like, aw, do I really want to read this again? But, once I opened it I was sucked right in, read late into the night and, when I woke up in the middle of the night, went back to reading instead of trying to go back to sleep. And then I kept reading the next morning instead of getting up and doing laundry and cleaning the house and, when I finished, I wanted to take another Haddam off the shelf and read that, and then another, and then another, and then just start all over again.

That’s going to make it very challenging to keep up with my book-a-day blog.

Alas.

1. I never see Dorothy Cannell around anymore either. I have no idea where my collection of her mysteries went – they may have also been washed away by the flood but in the back of my head, a little voice is whispering that I got rid of them for some reason. Maybe I shipped them to my sister. Maybe because the main character, who was pointedly overweight for much of the series, lost a bunch of weight and suddenly had a love life (? am I remembering that right ?). Nah, they must have been lost in the flood. ↩︎
2. So dated. What would they put on these shows now? “My husband likes to have sex with the couch? My husband slept with a porn star and paid to keep it a secret?” There is no shame anymore. ↩︎
3. Plan B being the women in the “my husband won’t perform cunnilingus on me” support group. And, of course, their unsuspecting husbands, most of whom were never even asked, and the rest have never heard of it. ↩︎
4. The sister killed a bunch of their family members. ↩︎