GÄHN. Das war letztes oder vorletztes Jahr ein Audible Freebie.

Mir fehlen noch ein paar Bücher für meinen diesjährigen Goodreads Challenge, und es ist kurz.
Das ist so ziemlich das einzig positive, das ich über das Buch sagen kann.
Die Erzählerin war in Ordnung. ( )

I've just discovered the Cherringham cosy crime series which is made up of novellas released every couple of weeks.

It's set in a village in the English Cotswolds and features a pair of amateur sleuths: Sarah Edwards a web designer, who has moved back to Cherringham with her two children after her divorce and Jack Brennan, former NYPD detective who, together with his dog Riley, lives on a canal boat in Cherringham in honour of his dead wife's long-cherished plan to retire to the UK.

I dived in at #25 because I needed something short and Christmas themed that my wife and I could listen to in the car. Something 170 minutes long that deals with Santa going missing just before he's scheduled to turn on the Cherringham Christmas lights seemed a good fit. When I saw it was narrated by Neil Dudgeon who plays my favourite Inspector Barnaby in the most recent seasons of "Midsomer Murders". it became ideal.

It lived up to my expectations, providing a light but crunchy plot with a soft feel-good centre that wasn't too sweet. Neil Dudgeon gets all the accents right. The pace worked well and it didn't matter that I'd missed the first twenty-four episodes.

At first, I was surprised to find that no US/UK cultural clangers were dropped. Then I looked up the authors and learned that Neil Richards is a Brit scriptwriter and producer and Matt Costello is an American scriptwriter based in NYC and they've been writing TV scripts together since the late 1990s.

I'll be going back to Cherringham regularly for small slices of entertainment. I've bought the first two compilation books which cover the first six novellas. ( )

Bill Vokes has been the Cherringham Santa Claus for years, an important part of a happy community celebration. This year, though, he changes into his Santa costume--and disappears. At first there is more puzzlement and annoyance than alarm; Bill has a habit of disappearing for short periods, though doing so in the hour or so prior to his scheduled appearance as Santa seems atypical.

By the next morning, though, some people are growing concerned, and Jack and Sarah are asked to look into his disappearance, since there is not yet enough basis for the police to do so.

They soon find that Bill Vokes seems to have no existence prior to the time, years ago, when he and his wife Emily arrived in Cherringham. And although he seemingly has a comfortable income, everyone has a different story about where he got his modest wealth.

What's going on, and what does it have to do with Bill's disappearance?

This is a clever and interesting Christmas short story. I really liked Jack, Sarah, and their friends.

Recommended.

I bought this audiobook. ( )

If you do a bit of short journey travelling, these short audio books can become a bit addictive in the style of MidSomer Murders, where a remarkable number of deaths occur in a small village community. They are cosies, intellectually undemanding, nothing too macabre happens, and there's a lot of "common sense". I like the way Neil Dudgeon handles the narration, and also the development of the main characters Jack and Sarah. ( )