I learned this week that I need to be a lot more careful when I’m selecting books at the library.

It’s the time of year when I want to read moderately Christmassy rom-coms/chick-lit/women’s fiction. Not necessarily an all-out “Christmas” book, but a book that happens to be set around the holiday season. That makes them tricky to find. If it’s not mentioned on the cover, I have to flip through it and see if any particular keywords pop out. It’s especially helpful if there’s some kind of date to start each chapter.

On my last library trip, I found one that I thought might work. It was in the “unhappy wife wanting a different life” category, and I tend to prefer single woman stories to either “unhappy wife” or “wife discovers that her perfect life isn’t perfect when her husband dumps her” stories, but I didn’t have time to do a serious search in the library, and the storyline sounded interesting. A flip through caught a mention of Christmas. The cover was cartoony, suggesting comedy. So I checked it out.

I should have also read the marketing blurbs above the book description. I tend to skip those because I don’t want the publisher telling me that a book is “unputdownable,” “heartwarming,” or “hilarious.” However, it would have been a clue that they used the word “sinister.”

It turned out that this was not a quirky chick lit/women’s fiction. It’s a psychological thriller—a quirky one using a lot of women’s fiction/chick lit tropes, but it’s still about a woman who becomes obsessed with a serial killer to the point she ends up institutionalized (that’s in the prologue, then the book is about how she ended up there). The Christmas mentions were in a chapter of her in the institution (the book switches back and forth between the present and the past), comparing life there to Christmas afternoon, with the staff bringing out puzzles and games with the kind of forced cheer a mom has on Christmas afternoon when she’s trying to keep everyone together and in good spirits with lots of activities. My quick glance had shown me multiple uses of the word “Christmas” and the mention of a mother bringing out puzzles and games. I missed that it was an analogy, and a fairly dark one at that, since the Christmases the narrator was remembering were tense and unhappy.

That’s not exactly the fluffy holiday read I was hoping for. Yikes! I guess I should read the marketing stuff. I may or may not agree with whether a book is “unputdownable” or “hilarious,” but I do want to know whether the publisher considers the book “sinister” rather than “heartwarming.”

I have now done some research and found a couple of books that might fit the bill, and I’ve requested them from the library, and I checked out an e-book for the time being. This weekend will be busy, but I’m hoping to finish the draft I’m working on early next week, and then I will have some time to sit, listen to Christmas music, drink hot cocoa, and read, and I’ll have proper reading material for that.

Now I kind of want to write the book I thought this one would be. It’s the kind of concept that could either be quirky and funny or sinister, depending on how it’s handled, and I want to do the funny version. I’ll add it to the idea file.