Enjoy the Natal Day festivities. The fireworks. The concerts. The bridge walk. The cake. And be grateful that the birthday will be nothing like the birthdays described in these books.
In Family Reunion by Carol Smith corpse after corpse pile up as estranged cousins are drawn together by their grandmother’s eightieth birthday. The granddaughters face grisly unanswered questions, not the least of which is about the newly dug grave on their grandmother’s property.
Again an elderly woman’s birthday reunites estranged former classmates in Three Weeks in Paris by Barbara Taylor Bradford. No corpses this time. Beautiful, successful women in the fields of high fashion and decorative arts face the events that divided them long ago.
It seems it takes a mother to bring the kids back together again. This time its 75 year old Lillie Mae’s birthday and her three daughters reunite in Blue Lick Springs, Kentucky in The Southern Belles of Honeysuckle Way by Linda Bruckheimer. Big business and cheating husbands are no match for these sisters.
Nameless Anywoman in It’s My F—ing Birthday by Merrill Markoe writes an annual report, a sort of State of the Union Address each year on her birthday in order the remember the important things she has learned each year. As she approaches her 40’s she has learned to not voluntarily participate in bad relationships, accept that there may be no acceptable guys in her life, and never to shop with her mother.
The Ninth Life of Louis Drax by Liz Jensen features Louis Drax, a very unlucky boy indeed. He is an unusual and brilliant child, to whom something dangerous and suspicious things happen. On his ninth birthday he falls over a cliff and ends up in a coma. While his accident is being investigated in the conscious world, Louis finds a ninth life in the unconscious world.
In And a Puzzle to Die On by Parnell Hall crossword puzzle enthusiast Harvey Beerbaum throws a birthday party for Puzzle Lady Cora Felton at the library. Celebration turns to murder when a corpse is thrown from the second floor and lands in the middle of a huge crossword puzzle cake.
