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    The Nightingale Before Christmas: A Meg Langslow Christmas Mystery
    Unavailable
    The Nightingale Before Christmas: A Meg Langslow Christmas Mystery
    Unavailable
    The Nightingale Before Christmas: A Meg Langslow Christmas Mystery
    Audiobook7 hours

    The Nightingale Before Christmas: A Meg Langslow Christmas Mystery

    Written by Donna Andrews

    Narrated by Bernadette Dunne

    4.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    As the holidays draw near in Caerphilly, Mother volunteers to take part in a big Christmas-themed decorator show house - each room of a temporarily untenanted house is decorated to the hilt by a different decorator for the public to tour. Of course, Mother insists that Meg pitch in with the organization, and she finds herself surrounded by flamboyant personalities with massive egos clashing and feeling their professional reputations are at stake.

    Then the rooms start to be sabotaged, and an unfortunate designer turns up dead - making Mother a prime suspect. Can Meg catch the real killer in time to save Mother the indignity of arrest?

    ©2014 Donna Andrews (P)2014 Dreamscape Media, LLC

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDreamscape Media Audio
    Release dateNov 25, 2014
    ISBN9781633795525
    Unavailable
    The Nightingale Before Christmas: A Meg Langslow Christmas Mystery
    Author

    Donna Andrews

    DONNA ANDREWS has won the Agatha, Anthony, and Barry Awards, an RT Book Reviews Award for best first novel, and four Lefty and two Toby Bromberg Awards for funniest mystery. She is a member of the Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, and Novelists, Inc. Andrews lives in Reston, Virginia. She has written over 30 books in the Meg Langslow mystery series.

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    Reviews for The Nightingale Before Christmas

    4.5/5

    9 ratings8 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Meg discovers that there is little worse than riding herd on a bunch of prima donna interior designers. Except finding one of them murdered while she discovers that she isn't alone in the house designated as a one room per designer show house for charity! Lots of humor, twists, red herrings, and a cast of characters who truly are. Excellent read! Bernadette Dunne continues to make good mysteries even better.
    • 5/5
      Excellent story and the characters are very interesting. I recommend this book especially around Christmas time.
    • 5/5
      as a seamstress and author this book touches all my passions. suspenseful and funny. great holiday read.
    • 3/5
      I love Donna Andrews books and enjoyed reading this one too!

      I won this book in a Goodreads giveaway.
    • 4/5
      It's almost Christmas in Caerphilly. Meg Langslow is coordinating the show for local interior decorators which is being held in a home that has ben empty for six years during a foreclosure process and which is bank-owned. When a decorator no one loves turns up dead, most of the designers end up being suspects. As more is learned about the man and about the house itself, additional motives are uncovered. It's always fun to visit with Meg and company, and this makes for a quick and fun Christmas mystery read.
    • 4/5
      An excellent story, with a nice little twist at the end. Donna Andrews knows how to write a cozy Christmas mystery that isn't merely set at Christmas time: it actually has Christmas spirit. So amidst the vandalism, the fights, and the dead body, there's also cooperation, family, Christmas trees, presents, snow, lights, carols, and Dickens. I closed this book feeling happy and in a Christmas mood. I'll admit it's not quite as good as last year's Christmas mystery Duck the Halls but trying to best a book that has both holiday spirit and a surfeit of skunks is sort of hard to do. There are fewer animal antics in Nightingale, and because of that, I think, less humour overall. Still, a great read, a great mystery and very Christmassy.
    • 5/5
      It's days before Christmas and plenty is stirring in the Historical Society's competition show house as the decorators work quickly to make the deadline of the night of December 23 for judging and a December 24th opening to the public. But that's not all that has the designer's in an uproar. Clay Spottiswood has them all seeing red. He is sexually harassing the ladies, dripping paint everywhere, and possibly stealing other people's packages. Meg Langslow, who was roped into being the manager of this mess by her mother who agreed to drop the idea of using her home if she would, can't prove that Clay has been taking the packages, but she can't disprove it either. She just tells people to start having their stuff delivered to their place of business rather than to the design house and to call the police. The police, however, believe it to be vandals who had been messing with the house for the past six months before the Historical Society took over with their design house idea that would finally get the house sold after sitting there empty for six years. The possible final straw comes when he knocks down a wall in the master bath after being told he could not do it, causing water to rain down into the study below it. Meg is tasked on the 20th of December with showing the house to a school reporter, Jessica while putting out fires along the way and making sure that Jessica knows to stay out of the designers' way as they are working. The other papers will be sending along reporters and photographers real soon themselves and nothing is ready yet. Meg's own mother is doing the living room. Ivy, a painter is painting scenes from fairy tales along the walls. Linda ("Our Lady of Chintz") is doing the dining room up, in you guessed it, chintz. Vermillion is doing one of the bedrooms up in goth. Eustace, a class act, is doing the kitchen. "Princess" Violet is doing one of the other bedrooms up in ruffles and lace. Clay has the master bedroom which he is turning into a stark black and red nightmare. Martha, ticked off at not getting the master bedroom, when she turned her entry in late and is lucky to be there at all, has two bathrooms and the laundry room. The usually unflappable Susan has the study. The quilting ladies have the bonus room.That night when Meg stops by to double check and make sure everything is locked up she hears shots and ducks into the study to call the sheriff's office. Once she's sure the person's gone she goes against dispatcher's Debbie Ann's advice and heads up to the master bedroom where the shots came from to find Clay on the bed with a bullet in his head. Most of the room has had an ax taken to it, which makes no sense if Clay was killed for all the trouble he has been causing. Besides, it seems as though all the designers have alibis. They were either with other people or each other during the murder. Was Clay really the target or was he just there by chance and happened to get in someone's way? There were enough people who wanted him dead, that's true enough, but there's more here than meets the eye. And while Meg swears that she's going to leave the mess with the Sheriff as she has too much to do, she gets drawn in and determined to find the answers all before the opening of the show house.Quotes:“Well, what do you want to be this year?” I’d asked. It wasn’t as if there were a lot of choices in a nativity play. Unless Robin decided to spice things up and add scenes not found in the original text. Based on the boys’ preferences, I suspected a scene with pirates would go down well with most of the participants. Perhaps instead of arriving in Bethlehem on a donkey, the Holy Family could come by boat, allowing Joseph to fend off pirates along the way. Or, better yet, what if the Wise Men could encounter a party of Imperial storm troopers—also bound for Bethlehem and clearly up to no good—and repel them with their light sabers?-Donna Andrews (The Nightingale Before Christmas p 223)Their crooks were polished till they shone; their belts were made of gold-brocade cord left over when Mother had gotten new curtain ties for her dining room, and we’d delighted them with long, fussy brown beards. It was going to look as if two members of ZZ Top were moonlighting in the hills outside Bethlehem.-Donna Andrews (The Nightingale Before Christmas p 224-5) “Aren’t you afraid they’ll mess up your kitchen?” I asked Eustace at one point. “Darlin’, have you ever seen a church lady who didn’t feel compelled to leave someone else’s kitchen even cleaner than she found it?” Eustace said. “Those ladies just might be my secret weapon to winning the prize [of best room in the Show House].”-Donna Andrews (The Nightingale Before Christmas p 393)
    • 4/5
      The Meg Langslow cozy mystery series is one of the most delightful reads within its genre. Donna Andrews' lastest addition to the menagerie, "The Nightingale Before Christmas" is a star shining bright and a wonderful read. The cast of interior decorators is well thought out - each with their own sense of taste and decorum, or not. Whose crazy idea was it to hold a show-house right before Christmas, as if preparations for the holidays aren't frantic enough? Who keeps stealing the UPS boxes of passementerie shipped to the show-house? Does one decorator have reason enough to snuff out another? While Meg's mother is focused on setting a brilliant holiday stage in the great room, Meg is scrambling to keep the decorators happy and hoping that they'll all play well with one another in the same sandbox - not a small order. What a great way to start off the frenetic holiday season. Synopsis:As the holidays draw near in Caerphilly, Mother volunteers to take part in in a big Christmas-themed decorator show house—each room of a temporarily untenanted house is decorated to the hilt by a different decorator for the public to tour. Of course, Mother insists that Meg pitch in with the organization, and she finds herself surrounded by flamboyant personalities with massive egos clashing and feeling their professional reputations are at stake. Then the rooms start to be sabotaged, and an unfortunate designer turns up dead—making Mother a prime suspect. Can Meg catch the real killer in time to save Mother the indignity of arrest? The brilliantly funny and talented Donna Andrews delivers another winner in the acclaimed avian-themed series that mystery readers have come to love. Cozies make excellent stocking-stuffers, and The Nightingale Before Christmas is guaranteed to put the "ho ho hos" into the holidays for the legions of fans hungry for another Christmas book featuring Meg Langslow. Donna has won many awards for this very popular series, and continues to come up with new hilarious adventures for her endearing heroine. The novel is full of superb screwball comedy as well as Donna’s trademark crisp plotting, not to mention bushels of holiday cheer--it wouldn't be the most wonderful time of the year without it.