Tag Archive for: Christmas Eve

It’s Christmas Eve. Is Anybody Out There?

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By Lois Winston

Since my December Stiletto Gang post falls on Christmas Eve, I’m wondering if anyone will even read what I’ve written. For that reason, I’ll keep this post short for the few of you who might take a break between cooking and wrapping gifts to grab a cup of coffee or hot chocolate and scroll through your feeds for a few minutes. Or maybe you’re traveling and camped out in an airport awaiting a flight or connection.

Happy Hanukkah and Merry Christmas!

For those of you who recently celebrated Hanukkah, I hope you had a wonderful Festival of Lights. For those of you who celebrate Christmas, Merry Christmas!

This has been a difficult year for many. I hope, as the calendar turns the page onto a new year, we’ll all see peace, hope, and good health on the horizon.

Thank you for being readers of The Stiletto Gang and the books written by our authors. You are why we do this. See you in January!

Embroidered Lies and Alibis, the latest Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery, will release on February 10th and is currently available for preorder.

Embroidered Lies and Alibis

A Stitch in Time Could Save a Life…

When Anastasia’s mother Flora is offered a free spa vacation from Jeremy Dugan, a man connected to her distant past, Anastasia and husband Zack suspect ulterior motives. After all, too-good-to-be-true often spells trouble. Their suspicions are confirmed when the FBI swoops in to apprehend Dugan. However, Dugan isn’t who he claimed to be, and his arrest raises more questions than answers.

The Feds link Dugan to a string of cons targeting elderly single women across the country, but his seemingly airtight alibi leaves investigators stumped. Then, shortly after his release on bail, he’s kidnapped. A certain segment of New Jersey’s population is known for delivering deadly messages, and the FBI believes Dugan received one of them.

Meanwhile, bodies begin showing up in the newly created public garden across the street from Anastasia and Zack’s home. With two baffling crimes, no clear suspects, scant evidence, and every possible motive unraveling, both the FBI and local law enforcement are once again picking Anastasia’s brain. This time, though, her involvement is far from reluctant. Will she stitch together enough clues before she or someone she loves becomes the killer’s next victim?

Craft project included.

Buy Links

Amazon

Nook

Kobo

Apple Books

What are you looking forward to in the coming year? Post a comment for a chance to win a promo code for a free audiobook download of any of the Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mysteries or the Empty Nest Mysteries.

~*~

USA Today and Amazon bestselling and award-winning author Lois Winston writes mystery, romance, romantic suspense, chick lit, women’s fiction, children’s chapter books, and nonfiction. Kirkus Reviews dubbed her critically acclaimed Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery series, “North Jersey’s more mature answer to Stephanie Plum.” In addition, Lois is a former literary agent and an award-winning craft and needlework designer who often draws much of her source material for both her characters and plots from her experiences in the crafts industry. Learn more about Lois and her books at her website www.loiswinston.com. Sign up for her newsletter to receive an Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mini-Mystery.

The Grinch Grows a Heart

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Writer, humanist,
          dog-mom, horse servant and cat-slave,
       Lover of solitude
          and the company of good friends,
        New places, new ideas
           and old wisdom.

 

 

What a year it has been, scowls my Grinch.

Covid has wielded a scythe among us for the past two years now, cutting down the elderly like dry wheat. Omicron is coming/here. Even if it proves to be less deadly, we could end up with higher deaths due to pesky math. (If the death rate is lower, but still occurs, and the increase of infections is significantly higher, a bad number times a decent number equals more deaths.)

And this question looms larger than I ever thought possible in my lifetime—Will America’s 200+ year experiment in democracy survive?

And the planet. I know scientists have set a degree limit on how warm we can get before things get “really bad,” but I wonder if the Earth knows to stop after it gets “really bad” and what happens after “really bad.”

Wait, I’m suppose to be bringing cheer and jollies on the night before this sacred buy-buy-buy holiday.

Humbug. Bah. Grrr.

What’s to bring to cheer? Which family members are missing around the table? How many families have no food, much less a table?  

What hypocrites we are. We are not worth surviving. 

My Grinch stomps out into the doomed world, turns a corner . . . and encounters this:

 

This man, Anthony Cymerys, is an 82-year-old barber. Every Wednesday he brings his equipment to a park and gives free haircuts to the homeless . . . charging only a hug.

My Grinch freezes.

Maybe . . . .?

This young man in the hospital bed has had multiple, painful surgeries. He is Anthony Borges. He was shot five times while holding open a door for other students to escape at the Parkland School shooting.

Maybe, my Grinch considers, as Dickens wrote, it is “the best of times, the worst of times, the age of wisdom, the age of foolishness, the epoch of belief, the epoch of incredulity, the season of Light, the season of Darkness, the spring of hope, the winter of despair.” Maybe we have “everything before us, nothing before us. . . .”

Then my Grinch reads this:



The world is not beyond repair. There is hope. That spark of love, that potential in the human soul, maybe it is enough to light the way in the utter dark of the universe.

Maybe we can find and augment that precious, holy spark and pass it on before it sputters. 

I join all the Stiletto Gang members to wish you a season of deep joy and giving and a New Year that ignites all our sparks into a steady flame against the Darkness.

T.K. Thorne is a retired police captain who writes books, which, like this blog, go wherever her curiosity and imagination take her.