Happy New Year’s Eve everyone, I’m finishing the year with my last batch of Christmas reading of the the season in a post that was going to be new Christmas reads, but has actually turned out to be new Christmas Mysteries and so I have adjusted the title accordingly!
Miss Winter in the Library with the Knife by Martin Edwards*
And I’m starting with the book that I finished the most recently, because it’s the most different (I think) as it gives puzzle to the reader to solve as they go along. Six people have been invited to the remote and mysterious village of Midwinter for a Christmas Murder Mystery puzzle weekend. Their task is to solve the clues and work out who killed a fictional crime writer. But soon after they arrive as the snow falls and blocks them off from the outside world, a body is discovered. Was it an accident or is one of the group a murderer – and if so why? As well as writing his own detective fiction, Martin Edwards writes the introductions to the British Library Crime Classics series (more on them later) and literally wrote the book on the history of the murder mystery genre, and this is very much in that tradition, with a few nifty twists. I’m not a puzzle person (especially when reading as an ebook) but I’m sure that element will appeal to some, but I enjoyed the murder-within-a-murder nature of the story and the shifting points of view of the narrative which managed to both add to the reader’s knowledge and confuse them further about the solution. A lot of fun.
The Christmas Clue by Nicola Upson
Now I appreciate that I mentioned Nicola Upson in last week’s Recommendsday but for Christmas 2025, Nicola Upson has broken away from her Josephine Tey series to write a standalone murder mystery novella based around the genesis of the board game Cluedo (or Clue if you’re American) or at least the imagined version of it. At Christmas 1943, Anthony and Elva take a break from their war work to head to the hotel where they used to work before the war to run a murder mystery weekend. But when they arrive they find themselves caught up in a real crime. Can they work out what has happened before it is too late. I really enjoyed this – it’s under 150 pages but there are plenty of twists and turns and I raced through it. I got it on a 99p deal on Kindle and it was totally worth it.
Death in Ambush by Susan Gilruth
Lee has been invited to spend Christmas with her friends in a country village. But what should be an idyllic trip starts to turn sour when a Christmas party is disrupted by a new resident and then soon after another resident suffers a stroke and then dies. But rumours soon start that it was actually murder, and Lee finds herself working with the Scotland Yard detective who has been called in to investigate. Does it count as new if the book was actually written in 1952? I’ve decided it does because this is this year’s British Library Crime Classic Christmas offering. Lee is an interesting character and she has a prior relationship with DI Gordon from another book (also long out of print) that is slightly flirtatious despite the fact that she is married (which may not please some people) but it didn’t bother me because it made for a really interesting dynamic in a clever murder mystery.
The Christmas Alibi by J G Colgan
It’s 1938 and a Christmas house party is assembling near Hexham. The host is a retired colonel, Monty and among the guests are his niece along with several men she has been entangled with and their wives. Among the men are a newspaper journalist, an MP and a man injured fighting against the Fascists in Spain. At the end of a ghost story, one of the guests is dead and as they are snowed in, the house party set about investigating whether it was suicide or if there is a murderer on the loose. This is a newly written book, but with a cover designed to make you think that it is in fact a classic mystery* and it felt a bit like the author was throwing every 1930s history event that they could think of at it. It’s pretty readable as you’re going along, but I didn’t think it stuck the landing on the ending – probably because of all the plot that was going on. Definitely one where you get to the end and realise you had more problems with it than you thought! There’s promise in there, but it needed more work. Why am I including it? Well if your algorithm is anything like mine, it’s been bringing it up as a recommendation for about a month now, so i thought it was worth reporting back!
And that’s your lot – and probably my lot for Christmas reading this year. I mean until I discover a Christmas book on the to-read shelf that I just have to read right now (probably in June). Thank you for reading the blog this year – and have a great night if you’re celebrating tonight, and no matter how good or bad your 2025 has been, may your 2026 be better.
Happy New Year everyone.
*there are quite a lot of these about – Hugh Morrison is definitely doing something similar with his covers and there are some that are even more BLCC coded out there.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 