Book Reviews by Elizabeth A. White

Joel M. Andre, author of the wickedly funny A Death at the North Pole, has the type of twisted, sarcastic sense of humor that I love. Given that, I went into his short story Tea With Death with high expectations and Andre did not disappoint.

Tea With Death finds the unnamed host and narrator welcoming Death for what he hopes will be an enlightening conversation. Getting on in years himself and having lost his youngest son to suicide born of depression, the host has many questions about how death actually occurs and what happens after. He also has a secret agenda he plans to spring on Death if the opportunity presents itself.

The concept of man sitting down for a conversation with the Grim Reaper is certainly not new in book or film, but it usually comes with either a boatload of pretentiousness or too much slapstick irreverence. Andre, however, strikes just the right balance.

Death and his host indeed reflect upon the process of dying, and along the way Death shares many of the secrets of his profession. He does so, however, with a wicked sense of humor and more than a dash of sarcasm, as evidenced from very the moment he shows up for his tea date: (more…)

Detective Lauren Bruni can be forgiven for thinking someone is playing a sick joke on her. After all, how often does one get called out to a remote North Pole village to investigate the murder of Kris Kringle? Yeah, that Kringle.

Bruni’s first clue that this isn’t going to be a typical day at the office is the hundred or so “little people” she finds clustered around the victim’s body upon her arrival at the scene. Not one given to belief in fantasy or the supernatural Bruni is skeptical, to say the least, when the little people inform her that they are actually elves and that the deceased is none other than Santa himself.

But when Bruni’s questioning of the witnesses, including a distraught Mrs. Kringle, finds them all telling similar stories she has no choice but to accept that either they are suffering from a mass delusion, or there really is more going on than her mind can readily comprehend.

In fact, when Bruni accidentally discovers a member of her investigative team is actually a flesh eating ghoul masquerading as human, the possibility that the deceased really was Jolly old Saint Nicholas and the little people are elves starts to seem decidedly sane in comparison. And when another prominent member of the community is murdered and she herself comes under attack, Bruni finally understands that something seriously evil is happening at the North Pole.

Author Joel M. Andre has taken a traditional murder investigation, mixed in the legend of Santa Claus, added a dash of horror, and topped it all off with a generous splash of fantasy. The result of this mad concoction is a world where security concerns over trade secrets and prototype designs requires swipe card access to the Top Secret Toys lab (an area which Head Elf Pepper refuses to allow Bruni to enter without a search warrant), and where Satan has hatched a sinister plot designed to destroy Santa and the spirit of Christmas, raise an army of the undead, and usher in Armageddon.

A Death at the North Pole is a delightfully entertaining, seriously demented, dripping with dark humor Christmas tale not unlike something I’d expect from the likes of Jeff Strand or Christopher Moore. If you’re ready for a change of pace from the traditional Santa story, and have a strong stomach (the medical examiner’s postmortem on Santa is quite graphic), give A Death at the North Pole a try.