Familiar territory with Meg Langslow and her family. This time, Meg is in charge of the holiday parade, and as everyone from Boy Scouts to representations of the twelve days of Christmas gather at her home to start the parade, someone does in the unpleasant local who is playing Santa Claus--in one of Meg and Michael's outbuildings. Meg's father takes over the role of Santa Claus and the sheep, camels, and elephants take off during a snowstorm for the parade, as Meg tries to stay out of the way of the police while investigating the murder and Michael goes around quoting A Christmas Carol in preparation for his one-man show. It's a familiar romp and ends with the all-too-predictable instance of the murderer holding Meg and half a dozen other people at gunpoint before being apprehended. I'd like to see Andrews wrap things up a little differently for a change, but it's still good fun. ( )

This delicious romp is part of a daffy mystery series featuring the Rubenesque Meg Langslow, daughter of a chic, slim, stylish and scary Virginia aristocrat mother and a simple, single-minded doctor father who never grew up (thank goodness). She's married to an ex-soap hunk and cult TV fantasy villain actor-turned-drama-professor at a small, exclusive liberal arts college located a few miles from her hometown of Yorktown, Virginia. Her extensive extended family includes a cousin who lives his life as a forensic technician from inside a gorillla suit; a cousin whose wool-headed New Age philosophical maunderings cause most of the family acute embarrassment; a younger brother who, like her father, never grew up but managed to make himself rich by starting a MMO-RPG company.

Getting the picture? It's a screwball comedy-cum-mystery, with a couple of befuddled normals at its whirling center. Think "Bringing Up Baby"--you know, the Cary Grant-Katharine Hepburn movie with the leopard and the madcap heiress?--and you've got the gist. And it's working for Andrews! This is the ninth of ten, to date, books in the series.

I commented once, on an LT thread now long buried, that I read mysteries to satisfy my orderly side. (The Divine Miss contends I *have* no orderly side, usually with a wrinkled nose and a wince as she looks into my bedroom.) This series of mysteries, despite the winsome chaos of the plot, scratches that bump with just the right touch. I love the characters, I willingly believe that (fictional) Caerphilly County, Virginia, is run by the lunatics instead of the asylum attendants, because *things go right* there. The right people are rewarded and punished. The right solutions are found to problems, and are implemented with a nudge and a wink at the law.

It's the way I wish Nassau County, New York, was run. It ain't, for the record, even close.

So when the chance came to join the Holiday (not Christmas!) parade and festivities in Caerphilly, Virginia, it would have taken a stronger man than I am to resist the siren call. I read the book in about four hours of snorting, giggling, howling fun. And that's the downside of Andrews's simple, direct prose: It flows like water over the eyeballs, nothing to impede the story being told, no snaggle in the current, just fast-flowing water from the Holy Well of Humor.

The humorless need not even bother looking at the book. The po-faced classics snobs should pass by the shelf, wincing disdainfully. The pseudo-erudite high-culture vultures stand warned off. The rest of us will be over here, in the corner, laughing fit to bust. ( )

December 23, and Meg Langslow has agreed to be Mistress of Revels for Caerfilly's holiday parade. With a Twelve Days of Christmas theme, there are a lot of animals around. The geese are people dressed up in suits, but the elephants are real. The pre-parade controlled chaos becomes even more chaotic when the dog-kicking curmudgeon playing Santa is murdered in the pig shed. Can Meg find the killer and save Christmas?

Another wacky bird-themed mystery from Andrews. Not the best in the series, but far from the worst. ( )

Terribly funny. I just don't understand why a llama for Christmas?

OK