Death at the Village Christmas Fair - Debbie Young **

By Brian Clegg

There’s nothing like a good Christmas mystery this time of year – and this is nothing like one. Debbie Young’s book is to a good Christmas mystery what a made-for-streaming Christmas movie is to It’s a Wonderful Life. It is bland fare, if suitably festive to pass the time waiting for the big day. There is far too much knitting, contemplating buttons, and heavy-handed dialogue. The main characters seem determined to think of implausible reasons for something to happen – for example blaming a raid on someone’s button collection on local kids where it’s already obvious that someone is after a valuable, button-like object.

It’s probably breaking a butterfly on the wheel but there are assorted iffy elements that distract from a smooth reading experience (including a surprising number of typos). At one point were are told when an assaulted character dies ‘I’m afraid they couldn’t save him. The police are now treating his assault as attempted murder.’ You might ignore the stilted dialogue, but when the victim is dead, it’s not exactly ‘attempted’. 

In an attempt at CSI thinking, we have a magnificent discussion of the possibility of identifying the murderer using the aforementioned bear-shaped button-like object. Our central character Alice comments ‘The texture might make a fingerprint harder to decipher.’ Her love interest Robert replies ‘But not DNA residue.’ We then get from Alice ‘”Goodness,” I replied. “And there was me thinking how tiny the bear was. Beside a DNA cell it would be a monstrous giant.”‘ A DNA cell? Really?

And then there’s a magnificent stray from logic in a description of the entrance to a privately funded museum. ‘Just inside the lobby stood a large glass cube with a slot in the top for donations. Inside it was a foot-deep pile of banknotes and coins – a mosaic of copper, silver, blue and brown, peppered with other colours of higher denomination notes that seldom came my way.’ Lots of cash donors then. ‘Next to the charity box was a card machine to accept electronic donations. I guessed their usual class of visitors didn’t bother with loose change.’ As the entirely empty cash box demonstrated. Doh.

Because I’ll read anything vaguely Christmassy this time of year, I finished the book in the hope of an interesting ending. Hope is a wonderful thing.

You can buy Death at the Christmas Fair (why am I telling you this?) from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com and Bookshop.org

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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.