Review - The Christmas Cracker Killer by Alexandra Benedict

The Christmas Cracker Killer

Alexandra Benedict
Simon & Schuster,  6 November 2026
Available as: HB, 304pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9781398532212

I'm grateful to the publisher for giving me access to an advance e-copy of The Christmas Cracker Killer to consider for review.

Christmas is all about tradition, and one of my favourite traditions is to read a puzzle thriller from Alexandra Benedict. Her latest, The Christmas Cracker Killer, is set in a remote (but luxury!) hotel on a Scottish island, where a bunch of guests are stranded over the festive season - with a killer among them.

The book features Edie O’Sullivan, crossword setter and amateur detective, her partner Riga, and her adopted grandson Sean, who we met in The Christmas Jigsaw Murders. This time they're off home turf as winners of coveted places at the launch of the Aster Castle Hotel. But someone, it seems, wants to launch a rather different enterprise - one involving murder and mayhem...

The Christmas Cracker Killer is a perfect slice of cosy Christmas crime, with a varied and suspicious cast of guests assembled to attract guilt (and death). Benedict conveys the different personalities of this crew brilliantly, wasting no time, as they arrive on the hotel's yacht, in sketching personalities and animosities, hinting at dark secrets, and giving fragments of history. We sympathise, for example, with Mara, the manager of the hotel, who's rather put-upon by her parents, the main investors; we boo at the unpleasant banker and the savage hotel reviewer; we note the tensions between some guests, and the hints of mystery attached to others.

Most of all, we thrill at the sections written from the killer's point of view (and reread them, looking for clues as to their identity).

Then, even before the first death, the puzzles erupt, with potential clues appearing in crackers as Benedict hints at who the killer will be, while scattering red herrings (literally - "swimming fish" play a big part here). She's also warned us that her own puzzles are contained in the text (some of them have answers at the end) underlying the main theme. 

The action proceeds at a good pace with crime story cliches both fulfilled and subverted (I loved the closing reveal of the killer's identity) and, suitably for Christmas, a hint of the ghost story.

Necessarily this book foregrounds the glitzy guests, the so carefully curated jolliness and the Christmas cheer laid on by the bucketful. (The descriptions of the food made me hungry!) But it also gives us the other side of things - the hard working staff attempting to deliver a luxury experience, even as things go badly, scarily wrong (it's good to see that hard work recognised). However, when all is said and done, it's down to Edie and Sean to solve the crime and stop the killer. Doing that requires a delve into the pasts of everyone on the island, as well as the killer's clues. But as Edie and Riga are among the guests, they may not be the impartial observers we expect - the killer may have business with them.

As well as enjoying Christmas crime, I also enjoy stories set in hotels slightly out of season (is that weird or just niche?) There's something about a hotel as backdrop that can be both familiar - hotels have lots of similarities - and strange - places that should be public, bustling, are a bit uncanny when mostly empty, I think? And once normality is shattered by a killing, everything is different. It can make for an atmospheric and chewy story and Benedict makes full use of that.

Strongly recommended.

For more information about The Christmas Cracker Killer, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - The Christmas Jigsaw Murders by Alexandra Benedict

The Christmas Jigsaw Murders
Alexandra Benedict
Simon & Schuster, 9 November 2023
Available as: HB, 352pp, audio, e   
Source: Purchased
ISBN(HB): 9781398525375

I really enjoyed Alexandra Benedict's Murder on the Christmas Express so once I had completed that trip, I made sure to collect all the pieces for this new mystery.

And it is a mystery in several senses. 

A week before Christmas, misanthropic crossword-puzzle setter Edie O’Sullivan receives a present - a handful of jigsaw pieces making up part of a murder scene. It's accompanied by a threat - Edie has been set a challenge, to prevent a series of murders which will climax on Christmas Eve.

Edie accepts the challenge, to the chagrin of her nephew Sean who, as a young Detective Sergeant, doesn't want her trampling all over the case (either metaphorically or - because Edie seems to know no law - literally, once the bodies start turning up).

The killer, "Rest in Pieces" seems to have a particular hatred of Edie, but is also happy to commit mayhem across Weymouth, causing panic and dismay among the Christmas lights and tinsel. What do they want, and can they be stopped?

This was a fun and enjoyable book, the more so - oddly perhaps? - because Edie is actually a thoroughly dislikable character. (She knows this - asked 'How many people do you p*** off every day?' Edie response is simple: 'Sure. I'm an a******e.' Admittedly as the story proceeds we learn more about what she's suffered, which goes some way to make her more sympathetic, but her behaviour is simply outrageous. Not suffering fools gladly, and rampaging across police business, is only part of it. She insults everyone she meets, behaves obnoxiously, and goes out of her way to be as disagreeable as she can. If somebody is targeting her, it's hardly surprising, and the list of suspects isn't going to be short. 

How Edie resolves this, what it might cost her, and where in her shady past she'll need to go to find the resources she needs in this crisis - well, read the book if you want to find out! It's frankly a puzzle bt one that Benedict pulls off triumphantly. 

And as I said above, that's not the only puzzle. Hidden in the story are multiple challenges for the reader, including anagrams and song titles (some of which I managed to solve, but mostly not - the story is so good and so distracting!) It's also got a pleasingly Dickensian (while modern) affect, signalled by the opening words: 'No one was dead, not to begin with.' Indeed there's perhaps a touch of the Miss Havisham about Edie - if Miss H was prone to solve murder mysteries.

All in all, immense fun.

For more information about The Christmas Jigsaw Murders, see the publisher's website here -

#Blogtour #Review - Murder on the Christmas Express by Alexandra Benedict

Murder on the Christmas Express 
Alexandra Benedict
Simon and Schuster, 10 November 2022 (HB) 28 September 2023 (PB)
Available as: HB, 341pp, PB, 368pp, audio, e   
Source: Purchased
ISBN: 9781398519824 (HB) 9781398519855 (PB)

I'm grateful to Anne Cater for inviting me to join the blogtour for Murder on the Christmas Express.

I do have a weakness for Christmas-themed novels, a weakness I'm indulging this year, and I also enjoy Benedict's books, so when Anne Cater was looking for bloggers to do the tour for Murder on the Christmas Express I leapt at the chance. Bring on the seasonal mayhem!

And there is mayhem here, it;'s true. But there's so much else to love as well. We meet a bunch of strangers on a train, on the night before Christmas Eve, some going back home for the season, some heading for a romantic mini break, just trying to get away from it all. A regretful ex-policewoman who wants to make amends to her estranged daughter. A dream journey into a silent Highland landscape - and a nightmare situation.

And one person who has particular business to conduct on that train

We're boarding the Caledonian Sleeper at Euston Station in London on a busy night. Of course the train's late and our passengers have to kick their heels in the lounge beforehand, revealing a lot about themselves and setting up conflict for the rest of the journey. Of course, something's going to go wrong, stranding everyone out in the snowy Highlands as the death count rises. Of course we get fascinating vignettes about our fellow travellers. Of course - I'd expect no less. 

Roz is our eyes and ears aboard the sleeper. A just-retired DI, she's travelling back to the Highlands to be with her daughter Heather, about to give birth, ready to support her and her girlfriend Ellie. Roz has spent her career trying to live down a severe trauma when she was young: the events of the next thirty-six hours will revive it and she'll have to test whether she is still able to help people, or whether a career in the muddled, compromised Met police has extinguished that spark.

Like Roz, the other passengers on the train are a thoroughly modern lot. We don't meet any spies, nuns or glamorous divorcées, but there is a beauty vloger, her sexist creep boyfriend, a party of students, a teacher with a shady past, a cat and a stowaway. And others besides. 

Benedict handles this largeish cast of characters very well, quickly grounding the reader with who is who and indicating which travellers get on with, and which dislike, each other - the heart of the book will be complex as they're forced to crowd together for safety and warmth, but when it does, the tension arises very organically from those well established relationships (although there are some surprises: we're not told everything we might know though the author respects the rules I think and tells us everything we need to know).

All that, and this book also manages to include a locked-room mystery, a pretty searching analysis of toxic masculinity (I would give a CW for mentions of sexual assault) AND its own side quiz with the reader primed to look out for song titles and anagrams in the text (I did poorly, but I'd plead that I got totally absorbed the plot so forgot to look out for them).

All in all a book which was great fun, had a compelling central character in Roz and some sharply observed (and rather tenderly done) others besides. It has quite a hard core though so I'd say, yes it's fun fun, but I'd hesitate to attach the label "cosy" too easily to it.

For more information about Murder on the Christmas Express, see the publisher's website here - and of course the other stops on the blogtour which you can see listed on the poster below. 

You can buy Murder on the Christmas Express from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.

#Review - The Party Season by SJI Holliday

The Party Season
SJI Holliday
Hodder, 9 November 2023 
Available as: PB, 320pp audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781399714259

I'm grateful to the publisher for providing me with a copy of The Party Season to consider for review.

I have a weakness for Christmas-themed novels, and I love Holliday's books, so this was bound to be my choice for a little seasonal mayhem. A sequel of sorts to her The Deaths of December, The Party Season picks up the stories of Detectives Eddie Carmine and Becky Greene.

Men are being killed at Christmas parties in the town of Woodham. Among the jolly music, holly - and the mistletoe - stalks a glamorous young woman in a party dress and heels who'll decide whether those men are naughty or nice... and act accordingly.

Carmine and Green are in a race against time to track her down before Christmas is ruined for the partygoers of Woodham.

I loved the contrasts in this book. There's slightly tawdry Christmasiness of everything (signalled by the inflatable snowman smuggled into Eddie's office early on), the debates about songs and films, the vendor selling dodgy Christmas trees from the middle of a roundabout on the by-pass. All excellent. I won't for a minute hear a criticism that all this vulgarity demeans Christmas - it has always been a raucous, roistering feast and I love to see that.

But there's another side, too. There's pathos here. Becky's mum turns up unexpectedly in a care home, near the end of her life. Becky's attempt to reintegrate the woman who abandoned her into her, before she dies, adds a real sense of coming loss and deepens the character, complicating what might otherwise be a full-on will they, won't they with Eddie (I have hopes they will, so let there be more books in this series!) The killer, too, it turns out, has suffered tragedies which are as one would expect a key part of what's driving events. But they take a while to expose so it would be spoilery to give too much detail. Indeed, unravelling that detail is what Carmine and Green are at through most of the story.

In a slickly written, page turner of a novel, Holliday introduces other themes too: a stalkery, unpleasant boyfriend, the stresses of office life (only magnified by the FOMO of Christmas parties and jubilations), a hint of a mystery from Eddie's past (I loved that Becky accepts there are things he won't reveal - these are partners who give each other some space) and a real injustice at the heart of things.

All in all this is entertaining, seasonal and fun, one of those books where you can't necessarily believe what you think you see. And it gives a hint of more to come, I have a sense the Holliday isn't finished with Carmine and Green yet...

For more information about The Party Season, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - A Stroke of the Pen by Terry Pratchett

A Stroke of the Pen (The Lost Stories)
Terry Pratchett
Doubleday, 10 October 2023
Available as: HB, 220pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9780857529633

I'm grateful to Milly at Doubleday for sending me an advance copy of A Stroke of the Pen to consider for review. I've been so eager to share this review, but barred by solemn and strict prohibitions form doing so before now.

As you can imagine I was delighted to see these stories had been discovered - the background to that, set out here, is truly intriguing: nobody knew about most of them as they were written and published, under different names, in newspapers before Sir Terry was widely known. The stories only came to light when Pat and Jan Harkin were asked to track down a potential serial, The Quest for the Keys, which is also given in full here. As well as finding all of Quest, Pat and Jan located another 18 stories besides.

The resulting collection is a glorious, if bittersweet, read - surely this must be the last posthumous Pratchett collection, even if one or two more pieces may emerge? Being home alone for an evening, I sat down and read them all without pause, savouring not just the Pratchettness of them all but also the overall effect of the collection. Yes, there is the occasional foreshadowing of something Sir Terry would return to later. As a child of the 70s, though, I also spotted a certain taste of that decade, for example the thinly disguised celebrities referenced in "How Scrooge Saw the Spectral Light..." or the industrial relations problems described in "The New Father Christmas".

If you can sense a theme here, yes, given their origin in newspapers, it's perhaps not surprising that a number of these stories have a Christmas theme, affectionately playing with the absurdities of the season. I did think that at the back of them one might see the ghost of Hogfather or perhaps even of Death, as an anthropomorphic projection finds itself needled out of its accustomed role. Maybe. I wouldn't insist on it - though I'd also point at "Mr Brown's Holiday Accident" which plays games with the nature of reality - creating a well developed and twisty example of SF as well as a very funny story.

Being funny is not unusual in this collection. While Neil Gaiman writes in the Introduction that Pratchett here "is not a humorist, not yet" there is certainly a sense of fun here, a willingness to send things up, with "The Quest for the Key", the longest and most developed story, already taking on the satirising of fantasy that later developed in Discworld. There is also a bit of a shared world going on, with the town of Blackburn recurring as a location for the bizarre. Not everything takes place there, though, these stories are varied, from a parody of a Gold Rush Western ("The Real Wild West") to a sort of Close Encounters spin-off ("The Blackberry Thing") to time-travel, dragons and ghosts.

Overall, the impression is of a writer whose mind is seething with ideas, busily selecting from them to fill the (scanty) room allowed for a newspaper story, salting them with puns and allusions, hinting at a complex world behind the whole, and having a great deal of fun in the process.

Much, in fact, like the later writer, apart, perhaps, from that need to get the whole thing down in 500 words...

In short, read this, it'll make you happy. (It might also make a good Christmas present...)

For more information about A Stroke of the Pen, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - Standing by the Wall by Mick Herron

Standing by the Wall (A Slough House Interlude)
Mick Herron
Baskerville, 3 November 2022 
Available as: PB, 56pp, audio, e  
Source: Bought
ISBN(PB): 9781399807081

This is perfect Mick Herron, perfect Slough House. On a dank Christmas Eve, as the office workers spill onto rainslicked pavements for some jollity and the failures of Slough House consider leaving early, Jackson Lamb has a little job for Roddy Ho ('Ho? Ho! HO!' - yes, I know, but the idea of Lamb as Santa, is, well, not exactly funny, but...)

That job, plus the angst and lethargy that seep out of the Slough House wall and carpets, give a hint, perhaps of the next main book (The Secret Hours), due in September 2023. They certainly focus on Lamb's - and Molly Doran's - lives, so maybe we'll hear more of those. But they also drop one or two surprises and feature a status report, as it were, on the interpersonal relationships of the Slough House inmates.

Best of all, we get Roddy monologuing at length. I always enjoy his internal narrative, deluded and self-centred as it is, which seems like tidings form a parallel world. I don't think I've come across any character in recent fiction who is so un-selfaware and whose intentions seem so unpleasant yet who one has to accept is at a fundamental level almost completely naive and innocent. Ho is of course only a microcosm of the entire Slough house experience - a pit of darkness and despair which is it seems, at the same time, the nations's last, best defence against the deeper darkness beyond.

A lovely antidote to Christmasness.

For more information about Standing by the Wall, see the publisher's website here.

#BlogTour #Review - The Wildest Hunt by

The Wildest Hunt
Jo Zebedee
Inspired Quill, December 2021
Available as: PB, 272pp, e
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(PB): 9781913117115

I'm grateful to Inspired Quill and to Anne Cater of Random Things Tours for an advance e-copy of The Wildest Hunt and for inviting me to take part in the book's blogtour.

Amelia, a struggling young artist, thinks she's struck lucky when a mysterious, wealthy client offers her £15,000 just for one painting. Enough money to sort Amelia and her boyfriend Joe's debts, maybe even replace their wreck of a car.

The only catch is - Jean wants the painting of remote Glenveagh Castle in Donegal to be done over Christmas. Tempted by the prospect of spending the alone time at Jean's remote cottage, and imagining a romantic, cosy time together, Amelia and Joe instead find themselves isolated in the worst winter anyone can remember with no power - and something has noticed them...

There's a time-honoured link between Christmas and the supernatural (as I write this, I'm preparing for a trip to see A Christmas Carol tomorrow) and it's one Zebedee draws on in The Wildest Hunt, blending the season of cold and darkness with powerful, mythic themes: not only the ancient entities that haunt the Glenveagh estate, but also a lost child, the propitiatory sacrifice of an innocent, and a greed for power and control. All of these play out in both of the couples about whom the story revolves - Amelia and Joe, and Jean and her husband Robert.

Amelia isn't exactly a stranger to the uncanny - she's had disturbing experiences before, and at the start of the book, we see another one. It's not something she actually wants to explore. However, she may not get to choose - the powers rising here are cunning and Amelia's weakness may be Joe, something of a reformed bad boy with whom she's very happy but who may be just a bit too enchanted by the atavistic threats awaiting here. The tension thrums as the story unfolds, Amelia perturbed by the reactions of her partner and unsure how far she can trust him.

There's a similar tension in the relationship between Jean and Robert, although for them, things have already been soured by Jean's suspicions about events forty years ago at Glenveagh. Zebedee's portrayal of the marriage here is stark - two people who seem to at best dislike, at worst hate each other, but who remain tied together as much by bitterness and suspicion as by circumstance. The darkness of Glenveagh will be eager to exploit this rift, posting the question, what does Robert really want?

I loved the way that Zebedee uses the relationships between these four people to sound the depths of the ancient darkness that confronts them. They face a struggle at two levels - understanding the supernatural forces that threaten, and keeping a hold on their humanity, their love, to resist those forces. With almost no other characters featuring for more than couple of pages, it's an intense, emotional read, the coldness without only endurable because of odd moments of inner warmth, alongside the short respites from that coldest of winters which Zebedee allows her characters.

A truly chilling read in every sense!) strongly recommended for the fireside on an iron-hard night, a book with both complex and intriguing characters and real sense of place - as well as an absorbing and knotty plot. But if you stay up late to finish it, don't blame me if you think you hear hoofbeats snd something snuffling outside... 

For more information about The Wildest Hunt and Jo Zebedee, see Jo's website here, the publisher's website here and the stops on the tour, listed on the poster below.

You can buy The Wildest Hunt from your local bookshop, or online from Hive Books, Blackwell's,  Waterstones or Amazon.

#Review - Secret Santa by Andrew Shaffer

Cover art by Adam Rabulais,
design by Ryan Hayes

Secret Santa
Andrew Shaffer
Quirk Books, 10 November 2020
Available as: PB, 210pp, e
Source: Advance copy provided by the publisher
ISBN: 9781683692058

I'm grateful to the publisher and in particular to Jamie and to Stephen for an advance copy of Secret Santa to consider for review.

In a fun, and seasonal, horror novel Shaffer peeks beneath the tinsel at a prestigious New Your publishing house to reveal the darkness within.

Lussi (pronounced, "Lucy") need to make a success of her new job at Blackwood-Patterson. Out of work for several months after her previous employer was swallowed up in a merger, when she gets a chance to pitch to the new boss at B-P for a job, she's not reticent ('all I do is shit best sellers'). But she's a genre editor - can she bring that success to a fusty literary publisher? And will her new colleagues let her try?

Given three weeks to try, it's time to raid the slush pile...

I love office based novels, and I love horror, so this was a perfect blend for me. I enjoyed seeing Lussi's attempts at fitting in and doing her job being frustrated by the stand-offishness at her new workplace, and then by a series of gruesome accidents. We've all that that moment (haven't we?) when we realise we weren't invited to a key meeting and wonder of it was on purpose. Or when we unintentionally press colleague's wrong button. Or HAVE OUR FOOD STOLEN FROM THE OFFICE FRIDGE. Shaffer deftly weaves such moments into a classic horror story, taking place, of course, close to Christmas. (Yes, I know it's Hallowe'en that is meant to be the season for horror but there's a reason for all those classic Christmas ghost stories...)

It's a book of contrasts - between friends and foes (but which is which?), the ordinary (mundane office life one moment, then a step into the spooky basement) and of course, in Lussi's increasingly desperate imagination, success and failure. Along the way, Shaffer has some fun with the publishing industry - I have a feeling some of the people described here may be closely based on real life. 

The story is very readable, and awash with a pleasing amount of mystery (who is being targeted, by what, and why - but even once you think you know the answers to these there are still secrets kept right to the end). Lussi is a smart and knowing protagonist - as a horror editor, she is well aware of this stuff, just not to meeting it in real life - but has to contend with a lot. It's not just the supernatural, there's the behaviour of her colleagues too, and indeed untangling the two is one of her most urgent problems, because even if she survives the monster, she's still got to rescue the company as well. Her new boss wants a bestseller and her wants it soon.

Overall a fun book which makes a nice counterpoint to the jollity of Christmas and strikes a good balance between out and out horror and office based humour. Secret Santa would make a good stocking filler for a horror fan, an office worker or anyone in publishing. (And because it's  all set in the 1980s, there is no home working, Zoom or social distancing).

For more information about Secret Santa see the Quirk website here.

Review - The Twelve Strange days of Christmas by Syd Moore

The Twelve Strange Days of Christmas
Syd Moore
Point Blank, 10 October 2019
PB, e, 199pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for a free copy of The Twelve Strange Days of Christmas to consider for review.

These are short stories which take place in the world of Moore's Essex Witches novels - supernatural thrillers focussed on Rosie Strange and her family museum in the village of Adder's Fork, Essex. The Strange family and its history entwine with that of the Museum which is itself a slightly uncanny place.

The stories fit with the wider series in a number of ways, variously taking place in Adder's Fork, featuring minor characters from the books or members's of Rosie's family (including Septimus himself), narrated to familiar figures or, in a couple of cases, I think anticipating future books. A couple are not, perhaps, strictly ghost stories but they slot in very nicely with the general theme which is of course death is a common - death anticipated, death mourned, death overcome - death awaited.

The collection does feature some stories which were in The Strange Casebook published last year but there are as many new ones, and the older stories stand up very well to rereading. If you've read and enjoyed the Essex Witch Museum books you'll have the chance to spot how the stories fit in to that world.

Septimus and the Shaman sees Septimus Strange recounting a wartime episode that took place while he was on active service. As well as shedding light on just what he got up to at that time (and perhaps his wider connections with the Establishment) it also contains a warning and some hints about Rosie's future.

Snowy is a gentle hymn to death and loss and perhaps - perhaps - to consolations beyond.

The House on Savage Lane, and Jocelyn's Story are stories of a slightly different kind, the sort where the revelation of what is really going on is what drives the horror (even if you'd begun to guess as I did for the first, not the second) so I won't say much about them. I think they look forward to potential future Witch Museum mysteries. I especially found Jocelyn's Story to be genuinely strange and unsettling. The House on Savage Lane was a bit more conventional but still had a couple of effective twists.

Easily Made is a kind of sequel to Snow, introducing a different kind of horror.

In the Bag is a classic ghost story, with a humorous twist on death and revenge. 

Death Becomes Her focuses on a policewoman we have seen before, and perhaps explains a bit about her.

She Saw Three Ships is a delight, a whole story featuring Ethel-Rose and taking place in that most ghost haunted and uncanny of English counties, Cornwall. What happens when the locals make you unwelcome on the eve of a creepy local festival? Well, you dig in and see what happens, obviously. This slice of folk horror is calculated to raise a shiver.

Madness in A Coruña is the longest story in the book, and is an effective and creepy ghost story, perhaps with an MR Jamesian bent. An unwary traveller to the Spanish city (yes, the same as in the poem by Charles Wolfe) discovers mysteries. The city seems to be guarded against something. But is it guarded well enough? As this story came to a climax I found myself sitting forward and gripping my Kindle, so tense did it get.

Christmas Eve at the Witch Museum is a real joy, a little slice of life at the Museum. It's all much as you'd expect, with Rosie hanging up the mistletoe and thinking thoughts of Sam, some gruesome exhibits on display and a surprise appearance by a very English phantom.

Barefoot Through the Snow is  a delicious, sad, classic ghost story fitting well into the Witch Museum mythology - the stories of innocent women tormented and put to death - as a mother seeks out her children across the cold, cold fields. It suggests some unfinished business that perhaps Rosie will be able to sort out one day?

A Christmas Carole is, as the name suggests, Moore's version of a time hallowed classic, one without which no collection of Christmas ghost stories would be complete. It's familiar, but she also gives it a distinct twist and make sit her own.

These are great stories. They will mean most to those who are familiar with the Witch Museum series, but the collection as a whole may be read as an entertaining and chilling group for Christmas. While some have appeared before that was in an e-only version and you'll want a print copy of this to live on your shelves next to the other Strange books, won't you?

For more about the book see the publisher's website here.

#Review - One Christmas Night by Hayley Webster

One Christmas Night
Hayley Webster
Trapeze, 14 November 2019
PB, 304pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for a free advance e-copy of One Christmas Night via NetGalley to consider for review. (I should admit, before I start, that while I don't know Hayley Webster, I do follow her on Twitter where she is unfailing interesting. If you don't follow her, you should.)

In One Christmas Night, we visit Newbury Street, shortly before the Great Day itself. With some prescience, Webster points to 'a Vote Green diamond sticker in the front window from the last election' - so we're bang up to date in 2019!

The residents are preparing, whether in the private houses, the subdivided flats, or the social accommodation of Victory House. Christmas may be an occasion for spending and cosnpicouous consumption, but it is a great leveller, rich and poor alike sharing in the nostalgia, the sentiment, the customs. Christmas Eve sees the annual Festive Feel Good at the Mariner pub hosted as ever by Sue and Larry. Fridges are full of turkey, trimmings and veg, and the presents are ready, mostly hidden in the cupboard under the stairs. At the Stop Shop, softened Easy Peelers are being sorted from the stock and last minute gifts bought.

Everything is nearly ready.

But of course (because otherwise there wouldn't be a story) not everyone is happy, not all is well.

A thief is at large, preying on all those tempting presents (and even on the food). We meet this person in the first pages, hiding in the shadows and avoiding the CCTV, and we see the grief they cause, the sense of violation of both homes and the season. Who would do a thing like that? It could be anyone, and it seems likely to be a local, someone well known to all the victims. Even though it's Christmas, Detective Constables Crane and Ado are on the job and on the lookout for the perpetrator.

Elsewhere, Frank mourns his wife. It has been a tumultuous year: he lost his Allie - and then fell for Jen, married to his best friend Craig. There are kids too, and it's all a mess.

Craig has his own secrets as well. And there's an elderly couple, Len and Wendy Finch, who are living on the edge of destitution - before things take a turn for the (even) worse.

A young woman mourns her lost daughter and takes out a record of Turandot which she plays every year, only on this day, remembering.

A husband browbeats and belittles his wife.

Two brothers are at odds with each other.

Joanie Blake misses her mum ('How can her mum just be gone...?') It will be the first Christmas without her, and everything must be done right.

Webster skilfully weaves together all these stories, and more, punctuating her tale with Lucy Crane's investigation and multiple appearances by a cat who, after the best tradition of cats, shows up at every house in the street. I was impressed by the depth and personality Webster gives her characters - whether or not they take centre stage, these feel like real people you might bump into in the shop or the pub. Above all, perhaps, this applies to Joanie and her girlfriend Irma, who are at the centre of things, Joanie is one of those people who - despite her own troubles - seems to hold up the entire community. She invites the lost, the lonely, to her Christmas table. She challenges a racist scallywag in the shop ('How dare this angry man, in his Budweiser T-shirt, leather jacket and Timberland boots call out a stranger in this way. How dare everyone stay silent while he does it?'). She is there when she is needed. And Irma, a stalwart behind the bar at the Mariner, whose anxious, haunted past is gradually revealed through the course of the story.

Not everyone is goodhearted, of course. Webster's less pleasant characters are just as well depicted, whether that racist, Euan, the ubiquitous thief (apart from their anonymous appearance at the beginning of the book, we know they're  stalking through the pages somewhere, we just don't know we are seeing them. And the trail of loss they leave behind, which almost everyone is having to deal with, is almost a personality in itself with a cumulative effect that's most chilling.

There are others - the nasty young man who whispers tales to the police, causing no end of trouble for... someone. Or that controlling husband (I won't say who it is, you need to let the picture build up). And there are some other dark themes here. A girl who was in care and whose foster mum failed at just the moment she needed a little love. Exploitation, racism and greed.

No, it's not all soft focus and angel choirs (in fact there are no angel chords). But Hayley Webster's empathy and understanding of character, and her writing are simply brilliant ('The sun was a stamp of approval, low, gold with rewards', 'Wendy sees the grin on the girl's face... The start of love when the flame's first lit'). There's a temptation to call a book like this "feel good", like the Mariner's festive event, and there's nothing wrong with that, but I think One Christmas Night does something more.

At the darkest time of year, you can't shut out that dark. You can't ignore it. You can't karaoke it away (even by '...singing "Santa Baby" in the most unsexy voice that's ever been used for any song since there were songs'). You can't eat it away, present it away or tinsel it away. You have to face it, invite it in. But once invited in, offered warmth, food and a place at the table, it might become less terrible.

That's what One Christmas Night does - it acknowledges the darkness (and such darkness) but shows that it does not, in the end, have the last word. There is courage here, generosity of spirit, solidarity. And that, to me, is the most Christmassy message of all.

I'd strongly recommend this book - and I think it's not just for Christmas.

For more information about One Christmas Night, see the publisher's website here.

#Blogtour #Review - Mistletoe by Alison Littlewood #NetGalley #MistletoeBook

Mistletoe
Alison Littlewood
Jo Fletcher Books (Quercus), 10 October 2019
HB, e, 304pp

Today marks publication of Alison Littlewood's latest unsettling horror tale, Mistletoe. I'm delighted to be able to join the book's blogtour and grateful to Quercus for a free advance e-copy via Netgalley.

'The night was filled with thoughts of mistletoe, dreams of mistletoe, the touch of it on her skin, the grasping tendrils entangling her limbs...'

I've loved Alison Littlewood's books right back to A Cold Season and here she is again at her icy best, telling the story of a woman alone, out among the snows of a Yorkshire winter, as Christmas approaches. (This book would definitely make an atmospheric Christmas read - or present - if you're looking for one).

Leah, mourning the loss of her son and her husband, has given up her city life - 'The world of cars and buses stinking of diesel, of towering buildings and grey streets, of all-night supermarkets and corner-shops, of anonymous crowds' - and exchanged it for 'a farmhouse, a barn, an apple orchard and a single field'. She's a 'comer-inner', having bought the (dilapidated) holding and intending to spend her time renovating the house, which husband Josh discovered and set his heart on before his death. Whether Leah is trying to forget Josh and son Finn or, somehow, come closer in this place where she'd imagined a new life with them, isn't clear.

Of course Maitland Farm isn't the rural idyll that Leah hoped for. Between a dirty, uncared for house with no working heating, Arctic weather, her haunting memories, a barn full of sinister junk including the creepiest doll outside Stephen King and a sense of wrongness, Leah's hopes are soon driven out by, not fears exactly (that would be simply sorted: back to the city!) but a growing disquiet.

Littlewood is a master at building up tension - escalating things slowly, springing her trap, then stepping back: oh, it wasn't a ghost, it was a neighbour accustomed to crossing the field rather than using the lane.

Or was it?

Here the tension builds credibly on top of Leah's already low, troubled spirits, the reader never being sure whether, when an odd thing happens, it's actually supernatural or born of her love and longing for Josh and Finn (or her lack of sleep). Perhaps it's impossible to disentangle all these? Suppose there are ghosts at Maitland Farm. Wouldn't that open a channel, a possibility, a way to Josh and Finn? So tempting. So very tempting. But at the same time, given the horrors that Leah begins to suspect - the hints she picks up form her neighbours about a dark past and about revenge and ill-luck on the house - what dangers might wait? The story keeps the reader on the edge of their seat, even as it takes a dark turn.

This book is a brilliantly creepy, atmospheric horror story. It wrings every last drop out of the dark side of Christmas: the bitter mistletoe berries, the cold of ancient sacrifice, the short days and above all, perhaps, the pain of being alone at a time of communal cheer and jollity. It is also a story of loss and vulnerability - there is a real sense that in placing herself where she has, Leah opened up to a real and terrible darkness. We begin to see echoes between events in the distant past - events that are impressed in the crumbling stone and barren soil of the farm - and Leah's own life. And the skin of the 21st century seems awfully thin at Maitland Farm ('Here, the past didn't fade to nothing...') with a potential, a dreadful potential, to draw her into its Midwinter dance, perhaps with a seductive hope.

There is also bewitching, lyrical prose here: 'The snow was constantly changing: now rose-tinted or grey, now golden or lavender, made new with every dawn or noon or evening and yet just as cold...' Littlewood vividly describes not only the horrors glimpsed in the shadows but the colour and sound and the bleakness of a hard winter.

It is, simply, a delight to read, a horror story but also a beautiful study of a woman very close to the edge, of friendship, loss and courage. Strongly recommended. (And if you haven't read Littlewood's previous books yet, you must: you have a treat in store. You can thank me later).

For more information about the book, see the publisher's webpage here. For other reviews of Mistletoe, see the blogs in the poster below. You can buy the book from your local bookshop, including via Hive Books which supports high street bookshops, from Blackwell's, Foyles, Waterstones, WH Smith or Amazon (and other places too).

Blogtour review - White Out by Ragnar Jónasson

White Out (Dark Iceland)
Ragnar Jónasson (translated by Quentin Bates)
Orenda Books, 1 November 2017
PB, 215pp

Today I'm joining the blogtour for White Out, a book I've looked forward to reading and reviewing. I'm grateful to Orenda Books and to Anne for a copy of the book and for inviting me to take part in the tour.

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year...

Ari Thór is back in Jónasson fifth Dark Iceland book (though - reader beware! - they have not appeared in order, so the events in this book occurs earlier than in some I'd already read).

Here, he's drawn by his ex boss Tómas into investigating a death taking place just before Christmas. Rather than leave the heavily pregnant Kristín home alone over the festive period, she accompanies him to Kalfshamarvik. There, Ari Thór and Tómas find an isolated group living in a remote house on the north coast - the edge of the inhabitable world.

A young woman, Ásta  has been found dead at the foot of a cliff - the same cliff where her mother and sister died. Did she travel there from Reykjavik to kill herself?

What really happened to the rest of her family?

Mystery interweaves with the lives of all the others who live on the isolated headland - brother and sister, Thóra and Óskar, local farmer Arnór and wealthy businessman, Reynir. For that matter, Ásta's past is something of a mystery. This story is perhaps a much more conventional mystery story - almost a classic setup - that the Other Dark Iceland books that I have read. There isn't the thrillery sense of other books in this sequence. To begin with, Ari Thór isn't called on to do more than observe and question, we have a very, very narrow field of suspects and the setting is drawn in such a way that wider entanglements such as political corruption or organised crime seem unlikely.

Rather we have an intense psychological study of the four residents (not forgetting Arnor's wife, of Asta and even, to a degree, of Ari Thór and Tómas themselves.  Motivations, locations and lies are slowly teased out and layer after layer of the past turned over and exhibited.

Ragnar Jónasson

Why did Ásta return?

What does Oskar get up to when he shuts himself away in his room?

What is Thora hinting she knows?

But above all, are those deaths all linked?

With no certainty that a crime has actually been committed, Tómas is under pressure to wrap things up quickly. His superiors would, it is implied, welcome the whole thing being sorted before the Christmas holiday. Similarly Ari Thór wants to return home to spend Christmas alone with his family.  You can feel the tension rising as things probe more complicated than they seemed. It's a short book, but an intense one, with a claustrophobic atmosphere oddly heightened by the Christmas cheer being doled out on the radio, in the hotel, in the church.

That makes it, in my view, an excellent Christmas read (we need a touch of darkness alongside the enforced jollity) and it is an excellent primer on Icelandic Christmas customs, too, which may have picked up some of the cultural baggage of the UK and USA but clearly still retain much of their distinctiveness.

As ever, Quentin Bates's translation is excellent, achieving both familiar, natural English that makes the translatedness near invisible but also a distinct sense of difference appropriate to portraying a different country.

The Lost Child of Lychford

Image from http://www.paulcornell.com/

The Lost Child of Lychford
Paul Cornell
Tor.com, 22 November 2016
PB, 130pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy via NetGalley

It’s December in the English village of Lychford – the first Christmas since an evil conglomerate tried to force open the borders between our world and… another.

Which means it’s Lizzie’s first Christmas as Reverend of St. Martin’s. Which means more stress, more expectation, more scrutiny by the congregation. Which means… well, business as usual, really.

Until the apparition of a small boy finds its way to Lizzie in the church. Is he a ghost? A vision? Something else? Whatever the truth, our trio of witches (they don’t approve of “coven”) are about to face their toughest battle, yet!

I am NOT Paul Cornell. Like him, however, I am married to a Church of England priest and live in a small community in Southern England. So I am loving this series (see here for review of The Witches of Lychford) as much for its depiction of the joys and frustrations of life in such a community, as for the supernatural spooky stuff.

The supernatural, spooky stuff is, is though, magnificently done, truly eerie and frightening. Lychford seems to be something of a spiritual front line, its streets carefully oriented to defend the town against incursions from outside and a trio of 'witches' - Lizzie, the new Vicar, Autumn, proprietor of the town's New Age shop and Judith, more of a traditional witchy type - on guard against incursions. The  supportive grumbling between the three women is one of the nice points of this story.

Like the previous previous book, this is short, a novella but - with the setting and characters now established - more of it can focus on plot and building tension, so it perhaps works slightly better in this length than Witches did - not to say that wasn't a great read, but you perhaps get more story here.

Again, Lychford is under attack but it's a more subtle, almost snide kind of attack and some of it has clearly taken place offstage, as it were. We're left - for a bit - to divine just what's going on, as Judith continues to care for her revenant husband, Autumn looks after her shop and Lizzie devotes herself to the rush of Chtistmas activities, supplemented by a couple from Swindon who want their wedding on Christmas Eve. (If there's ever a suggestion of a Christmas Eve wedding here me, my son and the dog will take drastic measures, up to and including organ sabotage). Is there a bad case of the midwinter blues (plus overwork) going on here or something sinister? This being Lychford, we can guess the answer...

Cornell gradually ratchets up tension, keeping the reader guessing about just what is going to happen (and about the place of that little lost ghost in it all). Then he springs his trap and all seems hopeless. In the darkest part of the year, the dark seems to be rising...

A wonderful, chilly tale, whether you treat it as a Christmas ghost story or a slice of cosmic horror. The author is clearly having fun with Lychford - and the Church! - and I hope there are more of these coming.