Winter must reads 2021
I did some deep searching and also asked you guys on instagram what winter books you love to read this time of the year. Below is what I found. Get ready!
All photos and book descriptions are from www.goodreads.com
*Any links provided may be affiliate links. You do not have to shop from the link I provided.
Whereas I have provided you links to shop these books online I highly encourage you to take a stroll to your local bookstore and support your town. Or maybe even cozy up in your local library and find one of these books to read.
Snowblind by Christopher Golden
I am currently reading this book!I am currently reading this book
The small New England town of Coventry had weathered a thousand blizzards...but never one like this. Icy figures danced in the wind and gazed through children's windows with soul-chilling eyes. People wandered into the whiteout and were never seen again. Families were torn apart, and the town would never be the same.
Now, as a new storm approaches twelve years later, the folks of Coventry are haunted by the memories of that dreadful blizzard and those who were lost in the snow. Photographer Jake Schapiro mourns his little brother, Isaac, even as-tonight-another little boy is missing. Mechanic and part-time thief Doug Manning's life has been forever scarred by the mysterious death of his wife, Cherie, and now he’s starting over with another woman and more ambitious crimes. Police detective Joe Keenan has never been the same since that night, when he failed to save the life of a young boy . . . and the boy’s father vanished in the storm only feet away. And all the way on the other side of the country, Miri Ristani receives a phone call . . . from a man who died twelve years ago.
As old ghosts trickle back, this new storm will prove to be even more terrifying than the last.
Get your copy:
https://go.magik.ly/ml/1d1j0/
The Valancourt book of Victorian Christmas ghost stories
During the Victorian era, it became traditional for publishers of newspapers and magazines to print ghost stories during the Christmas season for chilling winter reading by the fireside or candlelight. Now for the first time thirteen of these tales are collected here, including a wide range of stories from a diverse group of authors, some well-known, others anonymous or forgotten. Readers whose only previous experience with Victorian Christmas ghost stories has been Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol will be surprised and delighted at the astonishing variety of ghostly tales in this volume.
Get your copy:
https://go.magik.ly/ml/1d1jb/
The winter people by Jennifer McMahon
West Hall, Vermont, has always been a town of strange disappearances and old legends. The most mysterious is that of Sara Harrison Shea, who, in 1908, was found dead in the field behind her house just months after the tragic death of her daughter.
Now, in present day, nineteen-year-old Ruthie lives in Sara's farmhouse with her mother, Alice, and her younger sister. Alice has always insisted that they live off the grid, a decision that has weighty consequences when Ruthie wakes up one morning to find that Alice has vanished. In her search for clues, she is startled to find a copy of Sara Harrison Shea's diary hidden beneath the floorboards of her mother's bedroom. As Ruthie gets sucked into the historical mystery, she discovers that she's not the only person looking for someone that they've lost. But she may be the only one who can stop history from repeating itself.
Get your copy:
https://go.magik.ly/ml/1d1jh/
Murder for Christmas by Francis Duncan
Mordecai Tremaine, former tobacconist and perennial lover of romance novels, has been invited to spend Christmas in the sleepy village of Sherbroome at the country retreat of one Benedict Grame.
Arriving on Christmas Eve, he finds that the revelries are in full flow - but so too are tensions amongst the assortment of guests.
Midnight strikes and the party-goers discover that it's not just presents nestling under the tree...there's a dead body too. A dead body that bears a striking resemblance to Father Christmas.
With the snow falling and the suspicions flying, it's up to Mordecai to sniff out the culprit - and prevent someone else from getting murder for Christmas.
Get your copy:
https://go.magik.ly/ml/1d1jl/
Hercule poirots Christmas by Agatha Christie
In Hercule Poirot's Christmas, the holidays are anything but merry when a family reunion is marred by murder — and the notoriously fastidious investigator is quickly on the case. The wealthy Simeon Lee has demanded that all four of his sons — one faithful, one prodigal, one impecunious, one sensitive — and their wives return home for Christmas. But a heartwarming family holiday is not exactly what he has in mind. He bedevils each of his sons with barbed insults and finally announces that he is cutting off their allowances and changing his will. Poirot is called in the aftermath of Simeon Lee's announcement.
Get your copy:
https://go.magik.ly/ml/1d1jo/
The hunting season by eight authors
Winter, with its unsettling blend of the cosy and the sinister, has long been a popular time for gathering by the bright flame of a candle, or the warm crackling of a fire, and swapping stories of ghosts and strange happenings.
Now eight bestselling, award-winning authors - master storytellers of the sinister and the macabre - bring this time-honoured tradition to vivid life in a spellbinding collection of new and original haunted tales.
From a bustling Covent Garden Christmas market to the frosty moors of Yorkshire, from a country estate with a dreadful secret, to a London mansion where a beautiful girl lies frozen in death, these are stories to make your hair stand on end, send shivers down your spine and to serve as your indispensable companion to the long nights of winter.
Get your copy:
https://go.magik.ly/ml/1d1js/
White is for witching by Helen Oyeyemi
In a vast, mysterious house on the cliffs near Dover, the Silver family is reeling from the hole punched into its heart. Lily is gone and her twins, Miranda and Eliot, and her husband, the gentle Luc, mourn her absence with unspoken intensity. All is not well with the house, either, which creaks and grumbles and malignly confuses visitors in its mazy rooms, forcing winter apples in the garden when the branches should be bare. Generations of women inhabit its walls. And Miranda, with her new appetite for chalk and her keen sense for spirits, is more attuned to them than she is to her brother and father. She is leaving them slowly -
Slipping away from them -
And when one dark night she vanishes entirely, the survivors are left to tell her story.
"Miri I conjure you "
Get your copy:
https://go.magik.ly/ml/1d1ju/
Christmas tales of terror by Chris Priestley
From malevolent snowmen to Father Christmas - with a difference ... Chris Priestley is on absolute top form in these atmospheric, clever and thoroughly chilling stories. Add a new kind of thrill to the fluffiest of seasons with seven brilliantly conceived examples of why you'd better be good at Christmas time. For stories which can be enjoyed by the whole family, unwrap these perfectly formed festive tales of terror, each with a gripping yarn and genius twist.
Get your copy:
https://go.magik.ly/ml/1d1k7/
No exit by Taylor Adams, recommended by @splashofspooky
A thriller about four strangers, a blizzard, a kidnapped child, and a determined young woman desperate to unmask and outwit a vicious psychopath
On her way to Utah to see her dying mother, college student Darby Thorne gets caught in a fierce blizzard in the mountains of Colorado. With the roads impassable, she’s forced to wait out the storm at a remote highway rest stop. Inside are some vending machines, a coffee maker, and four complete strangers.
Desperate to find a signal to call home, Darby goes back out into the storm . . . and makes a horrifying discovery. In the back of the van parked next to her car, a little girl is locked in an animal crate.
Who is the child? Why has she been taken? And how can Darby save her?
There is no cell phone reception, no telephone, and no way out. One of her fellow travelers is a kidnapper. But which one?
Trapped in an increasingly dangerous situation, with a child’s life and her own on the line, Darby must find a way to break the girl out of the van and escape.
But who can she trust?
Get your copy:
https://go.magik.ly/ml/1d1ki/
Red Christmas by Reginald Hill, recommended by @poeandplant
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Have Yourself a Dickensian Christmas! That’s what the Dingley Dell, a secluded hotel in the English countryside, promises. Arabella Allen is eager to partake in the dancing, skating, and spiked punch—especially with Boswell, Dickens scholar and charming host. But when a blizzard leaves the guests snowbound, the cozy trappings feel more like an icy trap. Finding a frozen corpse can do that. Now Arabella is questioning the real motive behind drawing this assortment of strangers to the middle of nowhere. With all communication to the outside word cut off, the only one she can ask is Boswell. But as the temperatures drop and the body count rises, Arabella doubts she can trust even him on this increasingly deadly silent night.
Get your copy:
https://go.magik.ly/ml/1d1ko/
Voices in the Snow by Darcy Coates, recommended by @Candycornandblackcats
Clare remembers the cold. She remembers abandoned cars and children’s toys littered across the road. She remembers dark shapes in the snow and a terror she can’t explain. And then…nothing.
When she wakes, aching and afraid in a stranger’s gothic home, he tells her she was in an accident. He claims he saved her. Clare wants to leave, but a vicious snowstorm has blanketed the world in white, trapping them together, and there’s nothing she can do but wait.
At least the stranger seems kind…but Clare doesn’t know if she can trust him. He promised they were alone here, but she sees and hears things that convince her something else is creeping about the surrounding woods, watching. Waiting. Between the claustrophobic storm and the inescapable sense of being hunted, Clare is on edge…and increasingly certain of one thing:
Her car crash wasn't an accident. Something is waiting for her to step outside the fragile safety of the house... something monstrous, something unfeeling.
Get your copy:
https://go.magik.ly/ml/1d1ku/
I hope you found something inspiring to read on this list. Or maybe you have already read one and found another. Let me know what you think about this list in the comment section below how do you read any of these? Are you excited to find any of these? Let’s have a cozy chat!
