Such a fun murder mystery. I don’t typically read these but whenever I do I always fall in love with them. Love the quirkiness in the book and overall plot and content.

I loved this first in a new series...a lot!! Ellie and her older sister Meg, the Christie sisters are running the family's Book Chalet bookstore. The bookshop can be reached via a ski Gondola in the town of Last Word in Colorado. Despite the bookshop's resident cat being named Agatha, Ellie and Meg are not related to their favorite mystery author Status Christie. That being said there are many "What would Miss Maple do" moments in the solving of the mystery.
A stranger visits the Book Chalet during an evening book club meeting and later the two sisters spot him going onto the Gondola and upon reaching the other end the stranger is dead. Or rather the stranger has been murdered. And this begins the sister s, along with relatives Gram, and Rosie, and Piper a local reporter Marpling aka sleuthing. Chief Sunnie, who also is waiting to see her first moose is a great character. Thanks so much to NetGalley, Random House Publishing and the author for the opportunity to read and review this book. I hope the series does continue as I can't wait to be in Last Word again!

🚠Book Review🚠

Thank you to @randomhouse and @netgalley for this delightful cozy mystery, Dead and Gondola. I was emailed that I was pre-approved for this ARC a while back and I wish I had started it immediately.

You guys know what kind of Agatha Christie fan I am, right? Picture this, a quaint bookshop nestled into the mountains of a touristy ski village. The bookshop is owned by a family with the last name of Christie, though no direct bloodline to Agatha, unfortunately. They also have a bookshop cat named…Agatha. Two sisters are running the bookshop, including a book club when a strange man comes inside, disrupting said book club. After he leaves they discover he left behind his book. The sisters rush to the gondola in hopes of catching him…and lo and behold he is found dead inside. 😵

If you look up “cozy mystery” in the dictionary you might very well find a picture of this cover. Better yet, it’s a debut and is the first in a series! I can’t wait for the Christie sisters’ next installment, coming in October 2023.

Seriously, pick this one up. You won’t regret it. I. Loved. It. 🙌

I received a free copy from NetGalley. The gondola was a different setting that I found gave a fun new twist on a mystery. But the bookstore cat kind of made the book even more entertaining. A good cozy read.

I fell behind on reviews and the date is made up.

If ever a mystery deserves the description of Cozy - this is it. Set in a small town in Colorado, this story is inhabited by sister protagonists bearing the Christie moniker. With the last name of Christie and a cat named Agatha it is a foregone conclusion that there is going to be sleuthing in their bookstore. They are even referred to as the “Christie’s going Marpling.” Too cosy for words. “Visions of a dreamy evening… a bubbly soak in a magnificent clawfoot. Flannel PJs” and the constant reminders of Agatha the cat and her fishy favorite treats and dinner. The mystery with its convoluted here and there, now and then was fairly obvious. While it was just a little too cozy to be taken seriously it was a pleasant read.

Thank you Bantam Books and NetGalley for a copy.

This was a fun little mystery and I enjoyed it throughout. The writing style was slightly different than what I preferred but I still found this read highly enjoyable.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a copy to honestly review.

Thanks to Netgalley and Bantam Books for the gifted book I read along with the library audio.

Ellie Christie is beginning a new chapter by returning to her Colorado hometown to help her sister run their family's historic bookshop. It's a picturesque bookish destination in a small town perched on a mountain side. But when a man is found dead on the gondola and a rockslide forces the town into lockdown, things start to get very questionable.

Charming is the key word to describe this book. A charming town, bookstore, and characters. You feel like you are in the tiny Colorado town, hunting with the Christie sisters for clues. I thought the way the mystery unfolded was very interesting and how the layers of characters and clues were revealed was quite satisfying.

This is a cozy mystery, so nothing too gruesome here.

Dead and Gondola is the first book in a new shopfront bookstore cozy series by Ann Claire. Released 1st Nov 2022 by Penguin Random House on their Ballantine imprint, it's 336 pages and is available in paperback, audio, and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links. I've really become enamored of ebooks with interactive formats lately.

This is a well written and engaging bookish cozy mystery set in ski country in Colorado. The amateur protagonists, sisters whose name is Christie, who own and manage a bookstore, are intelligent and believably rendered. The clues and mystery are fair play, and are self contained in this volume, so no cliffhangers or annoying "cheats" in the solution. (Which is more than can be said for the Grand Dame of Mystery, Agatha herself). They even have a shop cat named Agatha. 

The pool of suspects is small, and although the denouement and resolution are fairly easy to guess beforehand, they're well written and satisfying. It works perfectly well as a standalone, and is a nice lead-in to the next book in the series which is due out in 4th quarter 2023. The language is clean, and there's no graphic violence or sexual content. This would be a good choice for lovers of light cozies, the kind with whimsically eccentric small town characters, a town diner, a shop cat, and rural countryside. Readers who are fans of Diane Kelly and Laurie Cass will find a lot to like here.

Four stars. This will appeal to light cozy readers. 

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

This book was cute. Not great, but cute. I suppose it would be a fun winter cozy read, but honestly I can think of better options. There was one thing the author did that drove me insane, and I just couldn't get over it. Instead of actually having the characters HAVE a conversation, she would summarize it in one sentence. Example (not a quote from the book): Instead of A and B talking to each other, she would say "And then A asked B if she could have a cookie and B said yes." This pulled me so far out of the story, and it just kept happening. I wanted to like this book, because I truly love the characters, but the writing style was something I've never seen before and just couldn't get on board with.

If you love cozy mysteries, the mountains and a grumpy cat, this book is for you! Fun and enjoyable, a great read on a snowy day with a cup of tea.

ARC provided in exchange for an honest review.

I’m still working on some of my backlog of ARC’s and finally got around to this one! I really enjoyed the quaint, sleepy town setting with a bookstore and a murder taking place on a gondola. It had lots of twists, most weren’t too predictable, and it felt like the perfect choice to read on this stormy day I’m having! It was so easy to slip into their sleepy small town setting and try to solve a mystery right along with them. I would recommend if you like sweet, light, mysteries that are easy reads.

This was a lovely, cozy read. I seriously can't wait to read more from this author! 100% recommend a read!

This book has a lot of potential to be a cute, cozy mystery. From the charming bookshop in a small town setting to the Agatha Christie mystery references to the quirky characters, this really should have been a slam dunk. Unfortunately it was in desperate need of good editing. This book was way too long and contained far too many pointless details that only served to drag this book out endlessly. The characters had zero depth which would be fine for a fast, quirky cozy mystery but for a drawn out saga the flat characters lost their cuteness quickly. I’m really sorry to say that, eventually, this book just became agonizingly boring for me and I had to skim it to reach the predictable ending. If you are obsessed with Agatha Christie books this would be worth reading as the references are beyond plentiful. For me, though, it just completely misses the mark despite its promising start.

Thanks to NetGalley and Bantam for an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

Murder mysteries are fun ways to start a new year. I wasn't up for some heavy, deep book to kick off the year. Dead and Gondola offered the perfect whodunnit. There was a book club in this book. People considered their day perfect for "murder" (it would to anticlimactic to say to read about a murder).

In this small, snowy, and quiet town where everything was local (no Walmart, Target intrusion yet!), Christies were the bookshop owners. They wore their last name like a badge of honor because they love mysteries and who is the best mystery writer: Agatha Christie! Christies took it up to themselves when they found a dead body in a gondola after their book club meeting. Because who could solve a murder other than people religiously read about murders....

It was a fast paced, part predictable yet keeping you engaged book. It is the first of book of a series based on Christies in their small town and I'm looking forward to read more about their adventures when things get heavy in other books

Beautiful historic bookstore - with owners that are sisters - last name Christie with their cat named Agatha -Picturesque Colorado ski resort - and a murder mystery to solve! Definitely a cozy murder mystery with lots and lots of drama. It is entertaining and was perfect for a snowy wintery day! There are many quirky characters but I was left wanting for a bit more character development - I wanted to feel more invested in them. But it was fun and I wasn't expecting the twist at the end.

When Ellie Christie moved back home to Colorado, to run the family’s bookstore with her older sister, she was anticipating a quiet bookish life. She had left after high school to experience more of the world. She had managed a beachside bookshop on a South Pacific resort island and was a private librarian for a antiquarian book collector in London. But when her parents decided they wanted to retire from the Book Chalet, Ellie moved back home and took up residence in the loft apartment over the shop.

She gets there just in time to help with the latest book club. Longtime bookseller Ms. Ridge is leading the discussion, but the group is quickly taken over by former actor and current internet bookish celebrity Morgan Marin, who wants to recreate a scene from the book, a séance. As she has her assistant pull out the Ouija board and set it up, Morgan talks about her excitement for the book, Agatha Christie’s The Sittaford Mystery.

Ms. Ridge excuses herself to make coffee for everyone, and Ellie is distracted by a noise that sounded like someone in the shop. The Book Chalet isn’t open yet, so she looks through the store to try to figure out if someone is there. But she can still hear Morgan and the book club, yelling out the letters that the Ouija board is spelling. D. E. A. D.

Ellie finds a strange man in the store, and he explains that he was supposed to meet “Cece” there. But there’s no one in the store by that name, and Ellie asks him to leave. He does, as Morgan’s voice continues to ring out. M. A. N.

Ellie goes back to the kitchen to find Ms. Ridge is gone. A search of the store doesn’t turn up the missing woman, which Ellie and her sister Meg agree is very unusual. And as they ride the gondola down the mountain later, to the town where Meg lives with her daughter Rosie and the sisters’ grandmother, they see the man again. He rushes into the gondola car ahead of them. But then something goes terribly wrong, because when he gets to the end of the bottom of the ride, he can’t get out of the car. The gondolier stops everything to try to help the man, but it’s no use.

The man is dead.

Ellie and Meg are determined to figure out who the man is, why he had been in their store, and who killed him. When it comes out that he was a disgraced financial advisor who had been sent to jail for defrauding investors, the suspect list becomes a little clearer. But some of those suspects hit a little close to home, to friends of the Chalet. And when someone breaks in to the bookshop, to make off with the bag that the dead man had left behind, Ellie and Meg feel that the crimes are hitting too close to home for comfort.

In order to protect their family’s bookstore and their favorite patrons, Ellie and Meg, along with Rosie and Gram, start their own investigation. But as they dig deeper, uncovering secrets and lies, they come closer and closer to a killer. Will they be able to find the answers they are looking for before a killer comes looking for them?

Dead and Gondola is a fun new Agatha-Christie-laden mystery set in the snowy mountains of Colorado. The Christie family is a close-knit group who look out for each other and those they care about. There is a grumpy store cat named Agatha who tends to steal all the scenes she’s in, and a group of locals who are full of personality. The mountain setting is charming, and the author trivia adds an extra bit of interest to the story.

I really enjoyed Dead and Gondola. I thought it was fun and creative. It starts really strong, and while I did get a little bogged down in the middle, I still wanted to get to the end of the story. I love this Christie family, and I hope that we readers will have more opportunities to visit the Book Chalet as they do more Marpling and solve more crimes (and for Agatha, eat more cat treats). But mostly I want to sit in a quiet corner of this bookshop and read a good mystery.

Egalleys for Dead and Gondola were provided by Bantam Books through NetGalley, with many thanks.

Another cozy mystery that I loved. A coming-home story. Small-town folks. Family-owned bookstore with their own bookclub that could potentially be descendants from Agatha Christie. A grumpy cat named "Agatha" in honor of the brilliant author. A very mysterious murder. A disappearance. A murderer on the loose. What's there not to love? With everything that is going on, you won't get bored. I need more book from this author. It may seem like it's a lot going on but it is so entertaining and that is just te purpose of this novel, I believe.

I really really enjoyed this debut series. I love the way the characters work together, and how they were all close knit throughout the whole village. I can’t wait to read more from this series.


I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley. This is my honest and voluntary review.

Cozy Mystery? Yes, please! The Christie sisters and their cat Agatha love mysteries and their favorite novelist. Their bookshop is known for a cozy destination, gorgeous views and maze like shelves. When a rockslide puts their town in lockdown there is no one in and no one out. When a mysterious visitor in their bookshop dies it’s time for them to help figure out The Who, what and why of the circumstances. This is the start of a fun series and i am excited to see where it goes!

Thank you #Bantam and #Netgalley for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

Reading this fun murder mystery was so fun. They use all they have learned from reading murder mysteries to try and solve a murderous death that has taken place in their store. With twists and lots of evidence trying to find out who the guilty party is!