Seasons greetings, friends! Here we are, the last week of 2025 and the final newsletter of the year.
The wraparound cover for the print version of That Murder Feeling should be arriving in my mailbox any day now. In the meantime, everything’s on track for the January 13 release of the ebook (full list of retailers can be found here) and reviews are starting to trickle in on Goodreads, NetGalley, and elsewhere.
Many thanks to those of you who’ve already read the ARC and posted a review. Much appreciated!
Fellow author Carolynn Gockel also has a book releasing in January, a sci-fi time travel adventure. The ebook is available for preorder on Kindle. It looks to be a fun read and is on my TBR list!
Over on Mastodon, we had a holiday thread going and one of the questions was “Do you have a favorite holiday treat this month?” Everyone had a different answer, from hot chocolate to eggnog to snickerdoodles. In our household, here’s a cookie that’s as much of a Christmas/New Year’s staple as a fir tree. Bear in mind that I have no talent for taking photos of food, but I did my best with the cellphone camera.
These are Serbian walnut cookies (vanilice). The recipe listed on Food52 is similar to our family’s, with a few small tweaks: we use butter instead of lard and skip the lemon zest; also, you can order vanilla sugar on Amazon, you don’t have to make your own. The recipe calls for shredded walnuts — you need a nut grinder — but the walnuts found in grocery stores tend to be… not great. We order ours from Tierra Farm and they’re so good I snack on them daily.
The vanilice cookies are delicious with or without the jam filling, traditionally rose hip or apricot. Our 21-year-old loves these, so they never last long in our house!
Wishing you a joyful 2026,
Neve
Neve Maslakovic 