Three Holiday Homicides to Hunker Down With

It’s beginning to look a lot more like Christmas now that Mary Higgins Clark and daughter Carol Higgins Clark have weighed in with their holiday offering, “He Sees You When You’re Sleeping” (Simon & Schuster, $20, 200 pages). Unlike last year’s seasonal bit of tinsel, “Deck the Halls,” which featured Mamma Clark’s series character Alvirah Meehan and daughter’s Regan Reilly, “Sleeping” has a new protagonist, a wannabe angel named Sterling Brooks.

Because in life he was, well, your typical lawyer, he’s not a shoo-in for paradise. The Heavenly Council, after keeping him cooling his heels for 50 years, gives him one last chance to earn his own key to the kingdom. He must return to Earth and help someone in need. He finds that someone at Manhattan’s Rockefeller Center at the height of the holidays, a sad little 7-year-old named Marissa. Seems her father and grandmother have gone away, placed in a witness protection program after incurring the usually fatal wrath of sibling hoodlums Junior and Eddie Badgett.

There you have it: a new spin on “It’s a Wonderful Life” with a fictionalized version of the Kray brothers standing in for “the richest and meanest man in Bedford Falls.” It’s an instant bestseller, of course, but under any other name than the magical Higgins Clark, this sweet, gooey and neigh-indigestible short novel would probably have been avoided like last year’s Christmas fruitcake.

The treacle is replaced by edgy humor in Sarah Graves’ “Wreck the Halls” (Bantam, $21.95, 277 pages), the author’s latest adventure of Jacobia “Jake” Tiptree, an ex-Wall Street financial whiz who several books back left the Manhattan fast lane in favor of the slower pace of the charming island town of Eastport, Maine (population: 2,000). The surroundings may seem a bit Jessica Fletcher-ish, but the particulars are closer to the real world than TV.

Aside from a habitual involvement in local murders, Jake has a life full of situations Jessica never had to worry about--an unfaithful ex-husband (whose visit “is like Typhoid Mary stopping in for tea”), a considerably more honorable “current husband,” a dyslexic college-age son, a dwindling bankroll and an 1823, three-story home constantly in need of repair.

The last has turned her from a helpless female whose only fix-it tool was “a small screwdriver for prying the battery out of my cell phone” into a handyperson who could show the guys on “This Old House” a trick or two about French drains. Hence the series’ subtitle “A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery.” Marking its move from paperback original to hardcover, “Wreck” is a snowcapped December tale that begins with Jake discovering the town butcher cut and wrapped in wax paper in his own display case.

Alive, he was a nasty specimen, a drunk who brutalized his wife. As a result, the wife is the obvious suspect, but as Jake and her good friend, Ellie, discover, she was not alone in wanting the victim dead. The mystery and its solution are satisfying, but what distinguishes the novel are its likable, no-nonsense protagonist-narrator, her references to home repair that the author cleverly fits tongue-and-groove into the story and, especially, the detailed descriptions of the town:

“A few blocks downhill--past Town Hall, the old grammar school and the soaring white clock spire of the Congregational Church--the blue, unbelievably cold water of Passamaquoddy Bay showed glitteringly between the red-brick buildings on Water Street.”

A reason for the precise, dimensional village mural is that the author lives in Eastport. One imagines she probably wields a mean hammer too.

If you’re facing a somewhat less than happy yule, take heart that your troubles will be nothing compared with those faced by Caley James in Charlene Weir’s “A Cold Christmas” (St. Martins Minotaur/Thomas Dunne, $23.95, 272 pages). The poor woman has three children, a house falling apart by the minute, a ne’er-do-well ex-husband and no money.

With her hometown of Hampstead, Kan., in the midst of the coldest winter in decades, she’s just come down with the flu. And the guy she’s called to repair her heater is in her basement, shot to death. Hampstead Chief of Police Susan Wren is having her troubles, too. She’d like to be able to sit back and mull over a job offer in San Francisco, but her staff has been severely crippled by the flu, and the repairman’s murder is just one evidence of the uptick in local criminal activity.

Weir has created a credible picture of a frigid small town and its basically unhappy people as they approach the coming of Santa, assuming his reindeer don’t die from frostbite or gunshot. In the course of her investigation, Wren, a human, if dogged, law woman, is forced to battle both fire and ice.

The fire sequence, in which she races into a burning building to save Caley’s young daughter, is powerful enough to make you smell the smoke. After the peril by ice, you may just be a little less nostalgic for those white Christmases we miss here in sunny California.

Dick Lochte, the author of the prize-winning novel “Sleeping Dog” and its sequel, “Laughing Dog” (Poisoned Pen Press), reviews mysteries every other Wednesday.