Death Comes at Christmas - Marie O'Reagan and Paul Kane (Eds.) ****

By Brian Clegg

A full-blown murder mystery would overload a short story, but for some reason Christmas crime works well in short form, as witness the series of classic books that recently tailed off with Murder by Candlelight. It’s refreshing to have a chunky new collection, some from high powered modern thriller writers – and the vast majority of the stories are well worth reading.

I think it’s fair to say that few come up to the really great classic Christmas mystery shorts, but I very much enjoyed, for example, C. L. Taylor’s How to Commit Murder in a Bookshop – I think many published authors would quietly identify with the targeting of agents, publicists, marketing people and the like (leaving readers and booksellers safe). Russ Thomas gives us a dark old Christmas house scare with The Red Angel, and there’s amusing murderous fluffiness in The Wrong Party. Some good twists too – for example in Samantha Hayes’ dark Frostbite, while Sarah Hilary’s Marley’s Ghost gives us a very satisfying ending in true Christmas Carol style.

There’s only one story that was an out and out turkey. Alexandra Benedict revived her unlikeable characters from last year’s Christmas Jigsaw Murders. The story’s one redeeming grace is its very clever title – The Midnight Mass Murderer. However, the mass murder in question – the killing of a whole midnight church congregation – wouldn’t work. The murderer’s threat (to kill ‘just under two hundred people’) is far too accurate a prediction as no one can accurately predict a congregation size, but more importantly the method (carbon monoxide poisoning) is far too slow and variable in impact to take out a whole group of people in one go with no survivors. Most hilariously inept, though, is Benedict’s attempt to take out our amateur detectives. Again carbon monoxide is the mechanism – but quite how this was emitted by ‘storage heaters’ – which are electric – is not made clear. 

It’s perhaps too much to expect every story in a collection to be a good one (though I’m not sure what the editors were playing at including that one) – but you still get 17 satisfying reads, which is an impressive success rate.

You can buy Death Comes at Christmas from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com and Bookshop.org

Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.