As we were reorganizing things around the house and I was looking for something fairly mindless to read, Naked Came the Phoenix showed up on the top of a pile of books. It is, I learned, the latest in a series of "Naked Came the..." books. The first was Naked Came the Stranger. Each of these has been written by a group of established authors. Each person writes a chapter. Each succeeding author is challenged to account for previous events and keep the story moving. Naked Came the Phoenix was written by 13 women writers of mystery novels. Names familiar from these pages are Nevada Barr, J. A. Jance, Anne Perry, and (the author of the last chapter) Laurie R. King. It was mindless fun to read. It probably wasn't mindless to write. I enjoyed the plot twists and character revelations people wrote into their chapters in attempts to befuddle following writers. Some of them seemed unfair, and while I really admired Laurie R. King's masterful conclusion, she did pull a few rabbits out of hats that weren't there. She also dismissed a few red herrings with waves of a wand. Great fun for a rainy afternoon if you have one this fall. (I read it on a hot weekend last summer.)

• A review by Marcia Talley at Crescent Blues Book Views
• A review by Harriet Klausner at BooksNBytes