From the Bookshelf of Reading the Detectives…

Rest You Merry (Peter Shandy, #1)

Charlotte MacLeod

Start date: December 1, 2023

Finish date: December 31, 2023

Discussion: Group Challenges

Why we're reading this: Last title in our 2023 challenge, a seasonal favourite!
[close] Last title in our 2023 challenge, a seasonal favourite!

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Group Challenges

* Sept 25: The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928) by Agatha Christie
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What Members Thought

Mar 16, 2009 Susan in NC rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: my-library, favorites, currently-re-reading, tbr-with-gr-groups, audiobook, want-to-reread, tbrpool25, reread, holiday-rereads, detectives-23challenge

December 2023 reread with Detectives group challenge: Never fails to lift my spirits and make me laugh out loud! One of my favorite Christmas rereads, this is the first in the author's witty, charming, clever Professor Peter Shandy series set at a small agricultural college in rural Massachusetts. Quirky characters, literate and funny dialogue and a delightfully twisted murder mystery - what's not to love?

2022 - okay, realistically, it’s a 4-4.5 star mystery, but I love slipping into it comforta December 2023 reread with Detectives group challenge: Never fails to lift my spirits and make me laugh out loud! One of my favorite Christmas rereads, this is the first in the author's witty, charming, clever Professor Peter Shandy series set at a small agricultural college in rural Massachusetts. Quirky characters, literate and funny dialogue and a delightfully twisted murder mystery - what's not to love?

2022 - okay, realistically, it’s a 4-4.5 star mystery, but I love slipping into it comfortably like a warm sweater! This year, I read and listened during a late autumn holiday at a Charleston, SC resort, just as the Christmas season was getting into full swing; a treat to see family, take our first vacation in years (health issues) in a place we used to visit annually - truly grateful, this holiday favorite added to my pleasure!
Poor Professor Shandy, goaded after years of badgering by the campus wives (yes, it’s a bit dated, no cell phones or computers either, yay!) to “please decorate” his campus residence during the college’s “Grand Illumination”, a holiday tourism extravaganza/fundraiser for scholarships, decides to ladle on the campy decorations - but it all backfires horribly, and he has to abandon his sprouting seedlings (it’s an agricultural college in rural Massachusetts, he’s a soil scientist) to do some detecting.

2020 - listened to the audiobook this time, not thrilled with this narrator, some odd accent and pronunciation choices. But I still enjoy the mystery, humor, and the look at the academic gossip, politics and shenanigans.

2018 - always makes me happy!

2017 - still five stars for me.

2015 - Always a favorite reread, still holds up and makes me smile and laugh out loud in a few spots, fun! I try and fit in a reread every year, light, snarky, quirky and charming - I've read and recently reread the entire series, but this is definitely my favorite book of the lot.

2014 - One of my favorite Christmas rereads, I try and get to it every year - so much fun! This is the first case for Professor Peter Shandy of Balaclava College, a small agricultural school in rural Massachusetts. The back-stabbing, gossipy faculty, Christmas setting and sparkling, snappy dialogue are a real treat, and I wish I had Professor Shandy for a science class, he's adorably old-fashioned, funny and sharp as a tack - a great amateur sleuth! He gets a wonderful sidekick in this outing, as he wooes visiting librarian Helen Marsh in a charming romantic subplot that in no way takes away from the mystery.

This book got me hooked on the whole Shandy series and Charlotte MacLeod's other series (Sarah Kelling and Max Bittersohn mysteries and her books written as Alisa Craig). I find most of her mysteries quirky, whimsical and charming, and while a few teeter into silliness or get a little carried away with the whimsy I think she's much better than most "cozy" mystery writers today. Her books are always fun to reread for comic relief and a good puzzle - no small feat! ...more

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Dec 14, 2023 Julie Durnell rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: mystery

This was a fun Christmas murder mystery-very much a 60's or 70's vibe going on, but I liked Peter Shandy and the academia setting. ...more

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May 28, 2011 Abbey rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites, reviewed, myst-cosies, vintage, series, myst-set-or-auth-new-eng, own, myst-fems-project, holidays

1977, #1 Professor Peter Shandy, Balaclava Agricultural College, New England; murder of an obnoxious woman at Christmastime involves a quiet academic in sleuthing and affection; her first adult novel, it's filled with all the right stuff for a lovely cosy village-type comedy/mystery, plus a bit more. Three-and-one-half stars.

Peter Shandy has had enough. QUITE enough, thank you, of being badgered and harrassed by the university's faculty wives, about participating in the college's annual “Illumi 1977, #1 Professor Peter Shandy, Balaclava Agricultural College, New England; murder of an obnoxious woman at Christmastime involves a quiet academic in sleuthing and affection; her first adult novel, it's filled with all the right stuff for a lovely cosy village-type comedy/mystery, plus a bit more. Three-and-one-half stars.

Peter Shandy has had enough. QUITE enough, thank you, of being badgered and harrassed by the university's faculty wives, about participating in the college's annual “Illumination Festival”, an enormous display of holiday lights wherein all the faculty housing gets “beautified” for the holidays and the entire town and college staff and student population sell stuff and do peculiar things to raise money. Since the lavish displays and free actitivies draw lots of tourists and folks from nearby towns, it's one of the major income sources for the little agricultural college and everybody is expected to want to pitch in and help.

It's not that Peter doesn't enjoy Christmas – he does, very much so, but in his low-key fashion, and he resents very much being told to “decorate” according to someone else's tastes. Namely those of Jemmima Ames and her cohorts on The Committee. Which tend to the overblown and somewhat tacky, although when compared to styles and attitudes of today now seem rather quaint. After being badgered again and again by Jemima and her minons, he finally snaps, and sets out to make this a Christmas The Committee will never forget. It is, but not only for Peter's, um, Production...

He arranges for the most garish, loud and tacky decorations he can possibly obtain, and pays a bunch of men to come in on one day and put all of it up for him, including extremely loud, completely hideous renderings of “Cute!!” holiday songs played at full blast and locks up both his house and the fuseboxes for all the equipment. He then skeedaddles out of town for a nice cruise. But things go seriously awry, starting with the boat, which develops engine trouble, and Peter decides to go home and, er, face the music... He fully expects to be in big trouble over his stunt, but not as much as he actually gets into. When he gets home he finds Jemmima's dead body behind his sofa, the lights and music shut off, and the entire town talking about his display.

This is a tidy, funny, look at peer pressure among academics, along with one-upsmanship ditto, and is filled with verbal sniping, lasciviousness amongst the faculty (and others), greed and hubris. We are introduced to a raft of wonderful characters. Peter, who is a grey sort of man at first but eventually grows into a much more colorful and interesting person. The President of the college and his wonderful wife, 'way over the top and lots of fun to “experience” but I wouldn't want to actually be in his path any time soon (I worked for a man very much like him and, believe me, it wasn't easy...). Miss Helen Marsh, librarian, who comes in to help out a friend of Peter's and winds up finding far more than she expected. Various nice friends and collegues; awful ditto. There are a lot of characters to keep straight but I've never had any trouble following Ms. MacLeod's stories.

She and I seem to have always resonated on the same humor wavelength – I've always “gotten” her jokes, and this is full of them: practical jokes, double entendres, other sorts of word play, historical, literary (and lots of other disciplines) references all gently slipped into the plot. And it's a good plot too, although a mite creaky now-a-days. This is a bit of a time capsule of a story, written in 1977, but isn't exactly “dated”, the reader simply has to remember that some things were different then, and leave it at that. Works for me, but then I was around New England in the late seventies, and I remember it well! (grin)

This was Ms. MacLeod's first novel for adults and she does it very nicely IMO. She gets a lot better, though, over the years. She published books for about twenty years and during that time wrote four series, each with many books, each distinctive in its tone and approach to mysteries. In this first mystery you can clearly see the debt she owes to past writers, especially Phoebe Atwood Taylor, another New Englander who in the 1930s and 1940s wrote humorous mysteries starring a laid-back, quiet-but-brilliant man (Asey Mayo series, set on Cape Cod). And her protagonist Peter Shandy is somewhat similar in occupation, attitude, and attributes to Jane Langton's Homer Kelly, a slyly funny New England mystery series that began in 1964. Ms. MacLeod obviously read those books and enjoyed them, but her creation of Balaclava College and Peter Shandy and friends is entirely her own. The ensuing books become more farcical but remain entertaining.

If you enjoy a good cosy “village mystery” filled with peculiar characters, tidy plots, word play and a satisfying conclusion, you can't go wrong with any of Ms. MacLeod's four series; besides the Shandy stories she wrote (as MacLeod) the Sarah Kelling and Max series, Boston (#1 The Family Vault). As “Alisa Craig” she also wrote two series set in Canada, the Madoc Rhys, RCMP stories set in Canadian Maritimes; these are affectionately humorous but less broadly so than the Shandy stories. And the Grub'n'Stakers series, about an extremely peculiar gardening club in the middle of western Canada (Alberta I think, but don't hold me to it, it's been decades since I read the series) – it's the most farcical of her series although some of the later Shandy books come close.

Obviously I'm infatuated with her writing, and justifiably so, IMO. It's smooth, intelligent, entertaining, and set in what is “local” for me. She is one of my all-time favorite mystery writers, and I was saddened when I heard she had to stop writing in the mid-1990s due to Alzheimers; she died a few years later, early 2000s I think. I miss her charming gentility, her way with words, her beautifully honed sense of the absurd. But she left us a big pile of wonderful stories to read, bless her!
...more

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Dec 22, 2016 Jan C rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: mystery, 2016

Enjoyable read. Christmas themed. I will be interested to see where this series leads.

Professor at college appears to have Penchant for finding dead bodies. Unfortunately, the first one was in his own house. Some comedic elements

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Oct 08, 2015 Jenn Estepp rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: sleuths-and-gumshoes, kindling, libraries-are-great, comfort-food, happy-holidays

'tis not at all the season for this book, but I was in the mood for a mystery and had never tried MacLeod. Fortunately, the holiday touches are merely the set up for a couple of murders, set on a fictional college campus near Boston. It will definitely not be my last MacLeod - I thoroughly enjoyed pretty much everything about this. And I only kind of managed to figure out the parties involved in the offing. ...more

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Dec 23, 2016 Carol Evans rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: christmas, mystery

I had never read anything by Charlotte MacLeod until I read her story in Mistletoe Mysteries a couple of weeks ago. When I was looking for a Christmas mystery that I hadn’t read yet, I ran across Rest You Merry. Since her story in the collection had been fine, not one of my favorites but not one I disliked, and this is the first in a series, I decided to give it a listen. I’m glad I did. Peter Shandy is a great character and the way the holiday tied into the mystery was well-done. I don’t want t ...more

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Dec 18, 2023 Ellen Librarian rated it liked it · review of another edition

3.5 to 4 stars for me. I thoroughly enjoyed the book, probably because it features a brilliant librarian as well as a totally annoying one. However, I never believed our hero and heroine would really be obsessed in counting everything, even when the total was over a thousand. Also, I guessed whodunnit pretty early on. And there were too many characters for me. The book is somewhat dated, though that never bothered me. But a fun read if you're looking for something light and enjoy a gentle spoof ...more

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