The 12 Murders of Christmas - Sarah Dunnakey *

By Brian Clegg

This is not the book I thought it was – I bought it as a murder mystery novel that, like Martin Edwards’ Miss Winter in the Library with a Knife or Susie Dent’s Guilty by Definition, contains a number of puzzles the reader has the option of solving. Instead it is a set of puzzles the reader has to solve to make sense of it, linked together by a running story of a murder, plus a number of short murder tales (which may or may not be true in the context of the plot) told by guests in a country house at Christmas. And unfortunately, while quiz question writer Sarah Dunnakey is fine at putting together puzzles she is a limited author.

As is sometimes the case with anthology tales told by a group of people, the individual short stories are weak and hard to engage with – and many of them don’t even end in any real way, simple presenting a mystery, with sometimes extra information available in the puzzles at the end of each chapter. I found them dull reading indeed. It looked like the overarching story would be stronger – the guests have been summoned a year after the house’s owner was murdered, at his request to solve his (expected) death.

This setting is inventive with a reasonable introduction to the characters (though they are somewhat two-dimensional). But because the whole thing keeps getting pushed aside by the tale telling, there is very little opportunity for development – most of the actions of the characters are described in a perfunctory fashion before we get on to the next story. Dunnakey does attempt a twist at the end – but it’s a totally pointless one, feeling like someone told her she ought to include one. I say at the end – but then the book doesn’t. In the final scene, the murdered house owner, in a video, describes why various of those present could be suspected of his killing, then the police arrive and the story stops. The (admittedly obvious) solution of who the murderer/murderers is/are is presented as a cipher, built from solutions of other puzzles along the way. 

For me, this total lack of understanding of how narrative works made this one of the worst books I’ve read. I admit, it does say on the cover ‘The Ultimate Killer Puzzle Book’ – so perhaps I should have taken this purely as a puzzle book (though it is described as a ‘festive whodunnit’ in its advertising) – but I read that simply in the sense that all murder mystery novels are puzzles. And even if I did consider it a puzzle book, I still wouldn’t have liked it, because so much of the space would have been wasted with those half-hearted tales. Not for me.

You can buy The 12 Murders of Christmas (but why would you?) from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com (audiobook) 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.