What we said about what we read in 2025

2025 was an amazing and tumultous year for Carolyn and Sarah, both of us making moves out of Denver. But we kept on reading (albiet at a slower pace!) and loved having conversations about it all. Join us for our take on 2025, and let us know yours!

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Watch clips from our conversations with guests!

Tea, Tonic & Toxin is a history of mystery book club and podcast. We’re discussing the best mysteries ever written and interviewing some of the world’s best contemporary mystery and thriller writers.

THE BIG SLEEP (1939) is a seminal work in the hardboiled detective genre, and it’s among the best of the Raymond Chandler books. It showcases Chandler’s masterful use of sharp dialogue, complex characters and his gritty depiction of 1930s Los Angeles.

Farewell, My Lovely (1940) by Raymond Chandler is a cornerstone of the noir genre and the Philip Marlowe books, showcasing Marlowe in one of his most memorable cases. The novel’s richly atmospheric prose vividly captures the seedy underbelly of Los Angeles, immersing readers in its gritty, dangerous world. Chandler’s exploration of moral ambiguity and flawed characters adds depth to the mystery, elevating it beyond a simple whodunit.

TRAITOR’S PURSE (1940) by Margery Allingham is a mystery thriller classic that masterfully combines psychological tension with a high-stakes plot. Suffering from amnesia, amateur sleuth Albert Campion races to stop a wartime national security threat.

The novel’s unique premise and tightly woven narrative create a sense of urgency and intrigue. Known for its psychological depth, it showcases Allingham’s skill at blending espionage with a classic whodunit. Allingham’s exploration of identity, loyalty, and duty cements the book’s status as a timeless classic in the genre. 

Published in 1942, LAURA by Vera Caspary is a sophisticated mystery novel blending romance and psychological intrigue. Told through shifting perspectives, it follows a detective investigating the apparent murder of a glamorous ad exec. It remains a cornerstone of noir fiction.

Rear Window (1942) by Cornell Woolrich is a classic in the suspense genre for its masterful use of tension and claustrophobia. The story’s premise—a man confined to his apartment who becomes an unwitting witness to sinister events—brilliantly explores themes of isolation, voyeurism, and moral responsibility.

The Rat Began to Gnaw the Rope (1943) by C. W. Grafton (the father of Sue Grafton) is a classic in the mystery genre for its clever fusion of humor, small-town charm, and hardboiled crime elements. Featuring Gil Henry, an unassuming and resourceful lawyer, the novel showcases an unconventional hero who unravels a web of corruption and intrigue with sharp wit and determination. Grafton’s skillful storytelling and engaging prose set a high standard for blending humor with suspense.

Transcript

Sarah Harrison: 0:12

Welcome to Tea, Tonic and Toxin, the only book club and podcast dedicated to exploring mysteries chronologically from Edgar Allan Poe to the present. We're discussing the best mysteries and thrillers ever written, as well as interviewing some of the world's most talented contemporary mystery and thriller writers. I'm your host, Sarah Harrison.

Carolyn Daughters: 0:35

And I'm your host Carolyn Daughters. We aim to educate, entertain, and reignite interest in exceptional and often overlooked authors who shaped the genre. Check us out at teatonicandtoxin.com and on our socials to find tons of great content and take part in the conversation. We love hearing from listeners, and we're excited you're joining us on our journey through the history of mystery.

Sarah Harrison: 0:58

Today's sponsor is our own Carolyn Daughters, Carolyn is a senior strategist and trusted C-suite partner who leads large scale business transformations, brand identity sessions, persuasive writing workshops and executive communications. Her work bridges strategy and execution across marketing communications, change management and revenue enablement, giving teams the clarity they need to execute and leaders the tools they need to drive sustainable growth. You can learn more about her consulting services at carolyndaughters.com. Carolyn, welcome to Tea, Tonic and Toxin.

Carolyn Daughters: 1:42

Thank you. What a nice welcome.

Sarah Harrison: 1:45

It's great to have you here. I'm so excited about our episode.

Carolyn Daughters: 1:49

To be fair, I'm usually here when we're doing one of the episodes as part of our best mysteries podcast.

Sarah Harrison: 1:53

Thank goodness you are. Where would I be without my cohost?

Carolyn Daughters: 1:57

We're talking about 2025 which was ages ago.

Sarah Harrison: 2:03

It feels like it. It feels like it now, even though it's barely January as we record this.

Carolyn Daughters: 2:11

It's a journey through 2025. A journey through crime fiction that took us into the noir streets. It had tons of psychological tension stories that were really interesting because they were shaped by watching, waiting, by all this moral ambiguity. I really loved a lot of what we read in 2025.

Sarah Harrison: 2:31

Yes, there were a lot of great themes, right? Not just as though that's not enough about who committed the crime, but power perception, stories people tell about themselves and others.

Carolyn Daughters: 2:48

I love that. And I'm still thinking about a couple of the books. There's a couple of them I still think about, and I'm like, that's cool.

Sarah Harrison: 3:06

That's great. When a book just stays with you and you keep thinking about it, it's sad to finish reading those books to me.

Carolyn Daughters: 3:15

We didn't have as many books in 2025 as we have in other years, right?

Sarah Harrison: 3:20

And listeners, if you've already listened to our prospective episode, you know why. It's been a little bit of a tumultuous year for Carolyn and I.

Carolyn Daughters: 3:30

I mean, it's only in the last week or so that I found the headphones for podcasting.

Sarah Harrison: 3:37

That's right, I just realized you do have your headphones on this time.

Carolyn Daughters: 3:40

I know, look at me all professional, my stuff has been in boxes that are still strewn throughout the house, and it was in a random box called Office important.

Sarah Harrison: 3:53

There you go. There you have it. That's where you keep your headphones for everybody.

Carolyn Daughters: 3:59

To be fair, I had like 12 boxes called Office important. I was like, Oh, good. Let me open all of the boxes and see if any of them happen to have headphones.

Sarah Harrison: 4:10

I feel that. I feel that, as someone who has recently moved, we got a lot of help with our move, which was a wonderful blessing, and I still don't know where all things were packed and labeled as boxes.

Carolyn Daughters: 4:25

I think right now, both of us are at this stage where you open a box and it's exciting, because anything can be in it.

Sarah Harrison: 4:36

Exciting is certainly a word for it.

Carolyn Daughters: 4:40

In 2025, our best mysteries podcast and book club read Raymond Chandler, we read Margery Allingham, Vera Caspary, Cornell, Woolrich and C.W. Grafton. We went from 1939 to 1943.

Sarah Harrison: 4:56

Yes, huge, huge chronological leap.

Carolyn Daughters: 4:59

Yes, four years. It was for us big.

Sarah Harrison: 5:04

Isn't next year going to be about the same?

Carolyn Daughters: 5:07

Next year is about five years. Not four, Sarah. I mean, let's not exaggerate here. It's about five years. Next year, I think 1943 to 1948.

Sarah Harrison: 5:23

Look, folks, what's the hurry? There's no hurry. We'll just read as we read.

Carolyn Daughters: 5:29

I think the 1940s is such a fun time for these books. Also, 1939 to 1943 we're seeing this noir form become reborn in a lot of these different books. And we're seeing the evolution of that. We're seeing fewer of the Golden Age mysteries, though Traitor's Purse is perhaps arguably a golden age. It's Margery Allingham is one of the queens of crime. Ngaio Marsh and Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. She's part of that group of extremely talented authors who captured a period in time and captured, really, captured the moment.

Sarah Harrison: 6:22

Excellent books. Excited by next year's list, oh, my god, wow. Carolyn, did you have any favorites this year? Anything you can pick?

Carolyn Daughters: 6:33

If I had a favorite this year, it's probably, I don't know. I have to, I have to really like just go for it, but that my top three from last year's best mysteries podcast and book club were The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler, Laura by Vera Caspary, and The Rat Began to Gnaw the Rope by C.W. Grafton. If I have to say one of those books that really I think about still, it's, it's The Big Sleep.

Sarah Harrison: 7:00

Okay, interesting. Why that one?

Carolyn Daughters: 7:03

I think because it was my very first Raymond Chandler. So I had not been exposed to Raymond Chandler until then. So for example, we also read Farewell Ny Lovely, which is amazing and arguably more beautiful in parts. And yet, The Big Sleep, when I saw it, I just thought, this puts me in a day and age. It helps me transport back to this period. I thought it was phenomenal. How about you? What favorites did you have?

Sarah Harrison: 7:35

Oh, man, it's hard to pick. It's hard to pick. One that keeps jumping to mind is the rat began to Gnaw the rope just well for a lot of reasons, but one of them is it's super readability. So that's the one I read on my trip back to Denver, and it was such a page turner, and it was so funny the guy's humor. C.W., if I may call him that, his humor is really, really funny and easy to slide into that, as well as being an incredibly, I think, like complex mystery on top of that. It wasn't like just a comedy book. It was a great mystery, but interwoven with a lot of comedy. And I tend to be fairly attracted to that. Similarly, Traitor's Purse, Albert Campion is a pretty funny character himself, and bug and there's just great classical characters in there. I really liked reading Traitor's Purse as well. I loved the amnesia aspect of it in that. And this is probably a thing I like about, if I like a book, there's usually something like this in there. Is it? It touches on a little bit more transcendent aspects, right? So as he's trying to remember who he is, he's also discovering who he is, and he has these great moments of introspection, like, Ooh, I kind of suck. I'm like, not great. What is wrong with me? That sort of external self picture I feel like is something so hard to get in real life, and it endlessly fascinates me.

Carolyn Daughters: 9:32

I really liked Traitor's Purse. I had never read Margery Allingham before, and I love the character of Magersfontein Lugg. What a character. I just love him, and was ready to read all the Margery Allingham books as part of our best mysteries podcast and book club. And as time permits, I do plan to read more for sure.

Sarah Harrison: 9:56

Go ahead.

Carolyn Daughters: 9:57

Nope, no, I was going to say. C.W. Grafton is, as many of our listeners know, the father of Sue Grafton.

Sarah Harrison: 10:07

Yes, how funny, yes, our guest there was so informative as well about that kind of relationship dynamic.

Carolyn Daughters: 10:16

L. Wayne Hicks was our guest on that episode, and we learned a whole lot about him. We talked about his relationship with his daughter. We talked a little bit about Sue Grafton. It was, it was a really cool conversation with him.

Sarah Harrison: 10:34

Probably the twist that got me the most was Laura by Vera Caspary. Though, I have to give props there, I think I exclaimed out loud, and folks, she should have read all these already, so we're going to be doing spoilers. But when it's like, oh, she's alive. What?

Carolyn Daughters: 10:55

I loved it. I thought Laura had just this really great noir feel. And I loved this character of Laura. I just I had not read this story before, and really felt like I should have read it before it at some point. It felt strange that I hadn't. I felt the same way with Chandler, that. How had I never read The Big Sleep or Farewell My Lovely before?

Sarah Harrison: 11:20

That was surprising, actually.

Carolyn Daughters: 11:24

We had great guests on both of those books as well. We had Anthony Rizzuto on The Big Sleep. We had Owen Hill on Farewell, My Lovely and they provided so much insight into Raymond Chandler, into Philip Marlowe, the main character into the books. I thought that was amazing to hear so much in depth information about these books from our guests.

Sarah Harrison: 11:49

They are terrific scholars. I love that they had just done the annotated version of the big sleeve. I love annotated versions. I'm one that I'll read it without the annotations, and then I'll go back through and leaf through all of this stuff so that it doesn't interrupt my flow. But I still want all of that detailed information, and then we'll join to that we had Arvind Ethan David's Trouble Is My Business, which was our first graphic novel that we got to discuss, which I thought was beautifully done. I really enjoyed it. I was so glad we included a graphic novel to our best mysteries podcast and book club.

Carolyn Daughters: 12:35

I did too. I loved that Arvind Ethan David took this story from Raymond Chandler and became the co-author of this graphic novel and really made it their own together. So it was really a compilation. And I don't read too many graphic novels, so I thought that was super fun. I know that, Sarah, you were really excited about it. And I was like, I want to read this too. But now I'm like, this is a thing. Graphic novels are a thing. Now I want to find out, some more that I can be reading.

Sarah Harrison: 13:01

They are a thing, and hopefully, fingers crossed, we might have one on deck for next year of a totally different variety. I won't say any more about that. Graphic novels are a lot of different things, and so that's where I think a lot of people associate them strictly with something like manga, but Arvind Ethan David was nothing like that, and it just had such artistry in the coloration and in the choices he made to carry the story through pictorially and also, I think noir tends to be associated with a certain visual esthetic, and so it was cool to be able to bring that into the novel. I like that a lot.

Carolyn Daughters: 13:52

And we're gonna do more Raymond Chandler. I don't think this coming year, but I think the year after. So we're already building, believe it or not, our list for 2027. Farewell, My Lovely and The Big Sleep are just the start. We're going to continue reading Chandler. And the cool thing about that is we learn more and more about Philip Marlowe with each book.

Sarah Harrison: 14:15

I really I'm going to look forward to that because I enjoyed Philip Marlowe as a character, and I also love these, how to say these authors that have just spanned a lot of time, right? Almost every year, I don't think we got to this year, but almost every year we do at least one Agatha Christie. That woman is just like brilliant and prolific. So it's really neat to be able to follow folks through their own sort of writing arc over the years.

Carolyn Daughters: 14:50

And we'll have Death Comes as the End in 2026 as part of our best mysteries podcast and book club. We'll have more Agatha Christie as we should. But we had a shorter list, but very powerful offerings, or very powerful books, I think. Another one is Rear Window, Cornell Woolrich, an author I had never heard of before, but who I was thrilled to meet. And Rear Window, of course, the basis of the famous film. It's beautifully done, and I'm terrified, depending on the page as to what is going to happen next, and I've seen the film, so I had a general idea, but that's how well Cornwell Woolrich tells the story is. You're with this character, and you're watching him not be able to get up and run and do all the things that you would want him to do at various points in this story. And so I was, I was with him, and really just felt Cornell Woolrich did a great job with this idea of a person being in a fixed position, looking out the world.

Sarah Harrison: 16:05

It's a whole treatise, really, on observation. And then it's not observation anymore. He's not forced to, but he forces his way into interacting with the situation. And I'll say as well, we've done a few movies through the years, and I just think, usually I'm a little disappointed, and I hate to even say that, because I'm such an Alfred Hitchcock fan, but the books they've been based on are so good. But in this instance, this was the first instance where I really felt like the film was every bit as good I did too. I really like it almost brought out and added to the things I liked about the book, and resolved some of the things that maybe I was less interested in about the book. I just I was great treatment.

Carolyn Daughters: 16:59

That camera would pan in on one of the apartments across the alley, and you would just get a snapshot or a vignette of what's going on there. And in really, in some cases, a few seconds, you had a very clear idea of what was going on. And it was easy to feel for characters, even if we weren't hearing what they were saying. And I thought that was so incredibly talented,

Sarah Harrison: 17:25

And maybe it's the material, I would say. It lends itself to a visual treatment and all of the observations, it just really made it real, gave it a lot of depth. If you're wondering what episode we're talking about, that is on our Patreon platform, where we have a lot of the bonus content and movie discussions of films made from some of these tremendous books as part of our best mysteries podcast and book club.

Carolyn Daughters: 17:51

For sure. I loved Rear Window by Cornell Woolrich. And I like that idea of like you're saying, the observer that the person who is instead of doing is watching other people doing things. And that was a theme in several of the books that we read in Laura by Vera Caspary, there's a whole lot of watching as well. It's, it's thematic throughout that book. I think that that ties together a lot of these books. It's really interesting to me. That is interesting.

Sarah Harrison: 18:25

I hadn't really thought about it, but Laura gets watched a lot by a lot of the other characters in the book. And they have their own even if they're not. I really liked the detective and Laura, honestly, who wasn't necessarily watching her at first, but just watching her picture, watching her painting, watching her room, and coming up with this inner person of Laura before he ever met her, that was really fascinating.

Carolyn Daughters: 18:55

There's also a lot of watching in The Big Sleep where somebody has got their eye on the house, and where, where a murder might take place, that sort of thing. And so it's, it's a lot of that, and it's very familiar to us as contemporary readers. And we watch television shows and series and things like that, where there's always the cop sitting in the car across the street from the house, and they're doing a stakeout, and we started to see some of that emerging here, which, which I thought was fun.

Sarah Harrison: 19:31

Definitely, were any of these? Well, I talked about what was the biggest twist for me. Did you have any surprises that jumped out to you other than that?

Carolyn Daughters: 19:43

I was surprised at how much I loved The Rat Began to Gnaw the Rope. Yes, same. I didn't know what to expect going in, but I didn't know that Sue Grafton until we put our list together. Sue Grafton's father had been a writer, so. So I didn't know what to expect coming to this book, and two things emerged for me. One, like, what a voice, what an incredible voice. And two, how much Sue Grafton seems to have aligned with her father, with regard to the way they have a protagonist, the way they tell a story. It's that the protagonist is really quirky. They're a little bit of an outsider. They don't necessarily look like a typical person in the way that they dress or appear, or, I think that she definitely drew from some of what he did, and she also made it her own. And so seeing that, I thought was really exciting, it made me want to immediately start rereading Sue Grafton novels.

Sarah Harrison: 20:53

That's awesome. We're gonna have to find a way to connect those two more chronologically as we get closer to her in time in our best mysteries podcast and book club.

Carolyn Daughters: 21:01

We're aways away from Sue Grafton. Maybe we figure out a way to bridge that gap, because I think that would be so much fun. I see daughter and father, father and daughter. I loved that. If you have not read The Rat Began to Gnaw the Rope by C.W. Grafton, strongly encourage it. I think you're gonna love it.

Sarah Harrison: 21:32

One of the things that I thought was really poignant that our guest was talking about, about that, though, was C.W. Grafton's self perception, like we're reading all the great things he's done, his amazing life story, and then the words he writes about himself. He just seemed so dissatisfied, like he got nowhere. He did nothing. He's terribly unsuccessful. That framework that he placed himself in while here we are talking about him and his daughter. How many years later, that part was like, very touching to me to hear about,

Carolyn Daughters: 22:15

That's one of the things when we bring these expert guests on, is they almost always know the biography of the author. They know their publication history. They understand how a book came about, and how, if it's a series, how the series evolves. It's really great information, and it, I think it from, from my perspective, connects me even closer to the book and to the author, right?

Sarah Harrison: 22:44

It's a double-edged sword. I would say, of our podcast is that, how great is it to be walking through the history of mystery and touching on all of these highlights and greats and pivotal genre changing, creating stories. And then also, like not to necessarily be able to linger or go in depth or know all about it. We have folks on who are doing their doctorate on some of these authors, or who have done their doctorate on these authors, and it's just like, Oh, it's great to draw on their wealth of knowledge. And it's hard not to linger. Are there any of them that you like? Wish you could be reading more of?

Carolyn Daughters: 23:33

Definitely Raymond Chandler, I would, given all the time in the world, just go through the whole body of his writing, Margery Allingham as well. We're going to see both of these authors again in our best mysteries podcast and book club. So we'll see Raymond Chandler with The Long Goodbye. We'll see Margery Allingham's The Tiger in Smoke. But we're probably not going to get to either of them and until 2027 so we're going to have to either be patient or read ahead. But Margery Allingham, I just, I think, is so interesting. We also had Mike Ripley on, who has continued Allingham's books with his latest and I believe, last book in the series, Mr. Campion's Christmas, and Albert Campion is just a treat. I already mentioned how much I adore love, but Campion is a treat. He's wonderful on the page, and he's in Mike Ripley series, aging, which is not always the case in a series. You could have 10 or more books in a series, and the protagonist is often frozen in time, whatever age they are. What have you, that's the age they are in book 10, book 20, and in Mr. Campion's Christmas, we've seen that time has passed, and. The character still feels alive and the story is still engaging. So I love that he picked up the baton, and has continued those stories.

Sarah Harrison: 25:11

Albert Campion, I love a series. I'll just say, whether it's sci-fi or mystery, a good character think we were talking about earlier, when you finish one of these books and keep thinking about it, it's a little bit sad, like you've lost a friend, but if you write a series, and you can come back and find your friend again, which is why I'm sure they're so popular. And I think we've had some authors say that publishers prefer you to make a series out of some of these. But that's a terrific one that I would love to read more of. Speaking of series, one of our modern authors, Puja Guha, had a great series, and we got to talk about her first book in that Ahriman: The Spirit of Destruction. So Puja Guha was a lot of fun too. Probably, to me, one of the most interesting things there was how it really seemed like she herself was probably a spy.

Carolyn Daughters: 26:15

Oh my gosh, she's almost definitely a super spy. And we both loved that, because she's so well traveled and so smart, has like a really great sense of this character and of the place, the time we came away saying, certainly she's a super spy, which she denied. In her defense, she did deny.

Sarah Harrison: 26:39

Of course she would, she would, that's part of the part of the facade, right? I'm gonna hide in plain sight as a spy author?

Carolyn Daughters: 26:49

And she joined us in studio as a guest for our best mysteries podcast and book club, so we got to meet the super spy.

Sarah Harrison: 26:54

That was great. I we got to figure out ways to have some in studio time, even though we are across the country from each other now,

Carolyn Daughters: 27:04

We are going to have to figure it out, because it's so much fun to have a guest in person. And I think part of that, and we talked about this in our perspective, but part of that is some of the events that we want to start showing up to being present for whether it's Edgar Awards or Thriller Fest or, we've done Longmire Days in the past, so we want to have an opportunity, if possible, to interview some contemporary authors at these events.

Sarah Harrison: 27:41

That would be great. For example, we got to talk to Tom Epperson about his book baby hawk. That would have been so fun. In person, he had so much great memorabilia and old Hollywood stories. I was just got a kick out of the fact that he actually was there at the filming of Chopper, Chicks, and Zombie Town, strangely obscure movies I've ever watched.

Carolyn Daughters: 28:11

I'm trying to think which one that Mike Ripley had just come back from when we interviewed him. It might have been booster con, I'm not sure.

Sarah Harrison: 28:26

That is a big one, so it's a good bet. We'd love to get to some of these events. Listeners, if you would love to also have us go to some of these events. Let us know which ones. Maybe I can I'll try and put a poll on the Spotify. Spotify lets me do polls associated with a podcast, so I'll put one on there with some of these events. And we'd love to hear what you think is the most interesting.

Carolyn Daughters: 29:00

So Sarah, we in our retrospective and a little bit here, talked about some of the challenges that we've experienced in 2025 but here we are. I believe we're starting our fifth year. We are. It's before.

Sarah Harrison: 29:16

And I was like, No, that can't be right? It's our third year, isn't it? I know

Carolyn Daughters: 29:21

it feels that way. So, I mean, let's talk for a second about why we're here, like for you. What? What brings you back to this podcast, especially after a challenging year like 2025 for our best mysteries podcast and book club.

Sarah Harrison: 29:36

Well, I think it comes down to Carolyn, the commitment that we made at the beginning, I would say to each other, which is, we want this to be a fun podcast. If it's not fun for us, then it's not gonna go anywhere. It's gonna die on the vine. And so I think, I think we've been gentle with ourselves, gentle with each other. And things switch our direction around or create unwanted pauses. And I think we've been even when things maybe all of life isn't fun all the time, but I think we've kept the podcast fun. We've read great books. We've got to speak to great guests and ask them whatever questions pop into our heads. Who doesn't love that? That for me, that kind of foundation of the podcast, of enjoying doing it. We hope you enjoy hearing it, but we really enjoy doing it, keeps me going. How about you?

Carolyn Daughters: 30:39

Carolyn, I think a lot of the same. For me, it's there are really important pockets of joy that come from doing the podcast, especially if I'm in the middle of a move, and I'm prepping my house for sale, and it feels like I've been doing this for months on end, and somehow we have to fit a podcast episode in there. And at the time, I'm thinking, Well, I don't have time to do this podcast. And yet, when I do it, I feel so grateful that I've done it and that I made space for it. It's important to me. Now that I've moved and I'm in Manitou Springs, Colorado, there are a couple goals that I have when I'm here, and one is to be outside early and often, and I've been taking advantage of that. And the other one is to really make the space for more creative endeavors. Recommit to the podcast, recommit to my own creative writing projects that really feed me in a different way, instead of simply just doing the laundry list that we all have of things, because I tackle a laundry list like nobody's business, it's to say some of these other endeavors belong on the list, and I need to honor them, because it really does bring me joy. When we do a recording of a podcast episode, it brings me joy,

Sarah Harrison: 32:06

That's awesome. I agree with that.

Carolyn Daughters: 32:11

So stick with us, folks, because we have a wonderful journey ahead. And if we haven't released as many episodes as you would like. The good news is that our best mysteries podcast and book club has tons of episodes and lots of content. So this is your chance to catch up a little bit and also get your books for 2026.

Sarah Harrison: 32:34

Hopefully you've been getting them. You can always get them from our Amazon site. We're actually looking to add a couple of other digital storefronts as well. So if you're interested in some other things, we've been looking at a books bookstore. If there's one you like, Hey, let us know. We'll check it out. We want to make book getting flexible and easy for everybody.

Carolyn Daughters: 33:01

And so I think it's book shop.org or something. And a books, which I had been saying A, B, E, because I am secretly 90 years old. I don't know. You might be saying it right. I don't know. But the real point with those two stores and with our Amazon stores, you never pay more to shop through our site. With those stores, we get a small commission, and it's very small, but it's a labor of love for us, and it's anything like that is very helpful for us.

Sarah Harrison: 33:38

Also it has even more on there. So if you go to our storefront, you can, I think you can follow our storefront like you would an author. And I put a lot of things on there by our modern authors. So there's all our history of mystery books, but then piles of books and media from our modern author so as not just the ones we read, but other ones that might pique your interest. So hopefully that's a fun resource to thumb through sometime.

Carolyn Daughters: 34:11

We had a conversation earlier today, Sarah and me, and talked a little bit about the website, and we're constantly pointing people to the website, but we haven't always clarified why our website, because it's, it's sure, it's our home online, but we're constantly updating it. It's got tons of content on it. It's, it's really cool. You can click around and learn all about our guests. Learn all about our books. Check out the full reading list of everything we've done. So it's not a static site by any stretch.

Sarah Harrison: 34:47

It's actually a great website, and it's one of the great ways to interact with the book. So if you're going on there, each and every page has a space where you can write us something. And actually. Sometimes you do both Carolyn and I get an email when that happens, we love it. So if Facebook isn't your thing, if Instagram isn't your thing, you can always go straight to the website and drop us your thoughts. Just go do all of the 2026 books coming up for our best mysteries podcast and book club, and then we'll have your comments before we record the episode.

Carolyn Daughters: 35:24

And then I have behind me, I don't know what's visible, 130 books that I've received for the Dashiell Hammett Prize to review, and we'll try to get some of these authors on to our show as well. I think a lot of them would be amazing interviews, and a lot of really great contemporary 2025, books have come my way.

Sarah Harrison: 35:48

I think that's so fun that you're doing that. So I'm looking forward to hearing about the results.

Carolyn Daughters: 35:57

As am I.

Sarah Harrison: 36:03

Well, Carolyn, it's been a delight as always, and I'm really excited about what we have going on this year. This will probably be March when this comes out. I'm going to venture a guess, so hopefully the rest of everyone's year is going great.

Carolyn Daughters: 36:20

And thanks, Sarah for being my partner in this joyful endeavor, challenging, hard to keep up with at times, but I find it really valuable. I love doing it, and I'm really glad that we're doing it together.

Sarah Harrison: 36:36

Me, too. We couldn't do without you. Carolyn, thank you so much.

Carolyn Daughters: 36:43

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