A tense thriller of child abduction set in LONDON
Christmas mystery set in the YORKSHIRE DALES
28th November 2024
The Christmas Eve Murders by Noelle Albright, a Christmas mystery set in the YORKSHIRE DALES.
Maddie Marlowe is driving from Manchester to Scotland on Christmas Eve, but an accident on the M6 causes her to embark on a detour. It is snowing heavily and as luck would have it, her car breaks down in the fictional village of Quernby in the Yorkshire Dales. She has no mobile reception but she is rescued by an older local man, plus his dog. He suggests she decamp to the local pub, the Merry Monarch, which will be warm and welcoming and will offer shelter overnight on the assumption her car needs some major mechanical attention.
A warm fire and a bunch of locals prove sufficiently inviting and soon she is involved in the scavenger hunt, the entertainment put on by the pub for the waifs and strays who are perhaps seeking festive joy because they don’t have any at home. She of course will need to join in.
She makes the essential phone calls to the her vehicle rescue provider, who, of course, can’t come out because of the weather, and she alerts her parents that she will not be arriving any time soon. Then the phone goes dead.
The party is well into solving Clue 1 of the Scavenger Hunt when the lights go out, and then, drumroll, there is a body; Mrs Kapoor is missing too.
Maddie is a bright spark and is soon dismissing suspicions that she, as the outsider, might be the perpetrator, and she sets about garnering the group’s sleuthing enthusiasm to find out whodunnit and what the motive was. There is a bit of a ghostly element that inserts itself into the story which, on the one hand, adds to the frisson of fear, but on the other left me a bit cold.
An enjoyable and quick read that has a good sense of claustrophobic atmosphere and chill.
Tina for the TripFiction Team
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very seasonal