Hello and the warmest of welcomes to damppebbles and to the final #CaseClosed post of 2024. You may be thinking to yourself, ‘oh, I don’t remember seeing ANY other #CaseClosed posts last year’. Well, yes. I started 2024 with the best intentions and wanted to resurrect my monthly wrap-up post from years gone by. I managed two months – February and March. On 14th January 2025 damppebbles will be nine years old so there have been numerous opportunities for me to write a #CaseClosed post. I think I’ve managed around 16 (out of 108!). Pretty dismal. But I’m finishing the year on a high. With the best intentions going into the New Year.

Anyhoo, a little bit of background. It’s called #CaseClosed because I mainly read crime and my husband is very good at coming up with clever names and blog features (he’s responsible for #R3COMM3ND3D too!). He suggested I call it #CaseClosed. I couldn’t think of anything better 😐😂

Right, on to the books! During the month of December I read the grand total of five books which may not seem a lot but I’m pretty happy with that! It’s been a busy month preparing for the Christmas holidays and reading time has been limited. I have also been reading two books at a time (which I NEVER usually do) but I wanted to keep my Kindle Challenge going so had to read on my Kindle every day. I was doing so well until Christmas Day when my two minutes of reading (🤭) failed to register and I lost my 55 day streak. Still, I plan to continue reading both a physical copy and a digital copy for the moment as it seems my good ol’ Kindle now records these stats, reminding me frequently to ‘maintain my streak’. Plus, I can’t resist a challenge! And talking of challenges, I successfully completed my significantly reduced Goodreads challenge in December too. Here’s the proof…

My goal was originally 92 books – one book every four days but life, the universe and everything got in the way a bit.

Anyhoo, on to the five books I read in December 2024…

➡️ Vengeance is Mine by Michael Wood
➡️ Under Her Roof by A.A. Chaudhuri
➡️ Skin Deep by Liz Nugent
➡️ I Was a Teenage Slasher by Stephen Graham Jones
➡️ You Are Fatally Invited by Ande Pliego

Full disclosure, I’m sat at my dining room table on New Year’s Eve writing this post. So there is a chance (a teeny, tiny squeak of a chance!) that I may finish the two books I’m currently reading before the New Year arrives (I will be staying up waaaaaay past my bedtime tonight to welcome the New Year in so, y’know…it *could* happen!). In which case, if all goes to plan, it’s not five – it’s seven! They are…

Bit of a Datura Books-fest going on at the moment!

➡️ Honeycomb by S.B. Caves
➡️ The Contest by Jeff Macfee

It’s a kind of ‘delete as appropriate’ thing. I may update this post on 1st January to let you know how I got on.

Watch out for my reviews of all of these books in the New Year.

During December I posted the following reviews on the blog. All of these reviews have been featured on damppebbles before but due to a lack of blogging mojo and wanting to take the pressure off a little, I reshared some of my favourite reads from 2024.

🖤 The Clinic by Cate Quinn
🖤 Murder Town by Shelley Burr
🖤 First Lie Wins by Ashley Elston
🖤 Twenty-Seven Minutes by Ashley Tate
🖤 We Used to Live Here by Marcus Kliewer
🖤 Five Bad Deeds by Caz Frear
🖤 The Intruders by Louise Jensen
🖤 The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff
🖤 The Stranger in Her House by John Marrs

There were my ‘going to be occasional – definitely NOT every week’ Top Ten Tuesday posts (which I managed to post on every single Tuesday throughout December — they’re occasional, I tell you!)

⚪ Tuesday 3rd December – Books with My Favourite Colour on the Cover
⚪ Tuesday 10th December – Books to Read During a Storm
⚪ Tuesday 17th December – Books on My Winter 2024/25 TBR
⚪ Tuesday 24th December – Books I Hope Santa Brings
⚪ Tuesday 31st December – Top Ten Books I Read in 2024

And finally, I also posted four WWW Wednesday posts where I share my previous read, my current read and what I plan to read next.

🟧 Wednesday 4th December
🟧 Wednesday 11th December
🟧 Wednesday 18th December
🟧 Wednesday 25th December

My most popular post on the blog for December was my review of The Christmas Guest by one of my very favourite authors, Peter Swanson. It’s a chilling novella set at Christmas time and is well worth picking up. Perhaps ready for next Christmas now?

Earlier in the year I spent a small amount of time pondering on what I could add to #CaseClosed to make it a little more interesting. I thought about what I find interesting when other bloggers talk about their reading schedules/progress and came up with two things. The first being a Goodreads Challenge check-in (which I’ve already shared for December so we’ll gloss over that for now). The second being a NetGalley check-in. I don’t know about you but I love to see what’s on everyone else’s NetGalley shelf, and, in particular, what their feedback ratio is 🤭😳

So, my NetGalley shelf. For anyone not familiar with NG it’s a site where you can request early copies of digital books in exchange for a review. For me, when I first started blogging, I got a little carried away and ended up with over 80 books on my shelf. Over lockdown I worked on reducing that to a handful of books with no more than five to-be-read books on my shelf. It was all going so well until my blogging mojo upped and left. I was still requesting books but not reviewing them. As things stand at the moment, my current feedback ratio is 92%, I have a grand total of TWENTY-THREE books on my shelf with two requests still pending. Of those twenty-three books I have read thirteen (working on the reviews at the moment!) with ten still to read. One of my bookish goals for 2025 is to get my NetGalley shelf back under control. It can be a bit of a beastie! Here are the ten books I still have to read…

💟 The God of the Woods by Liz Moore
💟 How to Survive a Horror Movie by Scarlett Dunmore
💟 House of Bone and Rain by Gabino Iglesias
💟 Nobody’s Hero by M.W. Craven
💟 The Surf House by Lucy Clarke
💟 Other People’s Houses by Clare Mackintosh
💟 Senseless by Ronald Malfi
💟 The Liar by Louise Jensen
💟 Our Last Wild Days by Anna Bailey
💟 Believe by S.M. Govett

What a bunch of fabulous looking books! I cannot wait to read them.

I read five (possibly seven! delete as applicable 🤣) great books in December but I knew what my favourite was going to be from the moment I cracked the spine….

So without further ado, my book of December 2024 is…

I Was a Teenage Slasher by Stephen Graham Jones

Stephen Graham Jones is a horror master and I loved every second of this book. His characters are divine and you can’t help but fall in love with them. Even if, as is the case in this book, they’re a serial killer! I highly, highly recommend this one. It’s a shame I’ve already published my books of the year list as I Was a Teenage Slasher certainly deserves a place!

So that was December on damppebbles. I hope you have a wonderful bookish year full to the brim of the best books. Thank you for your support over the last nearly nine years. It means the world to be. Here’s a cracking 2025 for all of us 🥂

P.S. If you’re looking for your next read then check out the hashtag #fivestarflashback on Twitter / X. I’ve been re-sharing all of my old reviews from the dawn of time itself (or 2016 if you prefer). It’s been so much fun digging in the DP archives! There are around roughly five reviews posted a day so lots of lovely book suggestions if you’re in need of inspiration.