Golden Age of Detective Fiction

Happy holidays to all of my readers! Christmas is probably my favorite holiday (after my birthday), and I am so excited to participate in the #20BooksOfChristmas reading challenge That Happy Reader created. If you’re interested in doing it, too, check out their post here. If you want to add a few Christmas-themed books to your list, please peruse my initial 20 Books of Christmas post, where I discuss the 20 books I’ll be reading over the 2024 holiday season.

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The Story

Lily Armitage, happily ensconced in London, has been summoned back to her family estate, Endgame House for the annual puzzle hunt. Lily has yet to go back to Endgame House since she found her mother dead several years earlier during the same puzzle hunt. She plans to ignore this year’s games as she has for so many years, except her grandmother writes to her and offers her a special prize- if she plays, she’ll finally know why her mother died, adding a layer of mystery to the puzzle hunt.

Lily, braving a howling snowstorm, embarks on a journey to compete in this year’s hunt against her cousins. The rest of the family, each with their own hidden agendas, competes fiercely to win Endgame House and the vast estate. But for Lily, there’s only one goal: to uncover the truth.

The rules are set: collect 12 clues over 12 days, and the house goes to the winner. With everyone locked into Endgame House and all the phones confiscated, the family settles in to begin the hunt to end all hunts. But this time, there’s a twist: they are being hunted by one of their own. Will Lily uncover the truth of her mother’s death, or will the Endgame House hunt claim her life just like her mother’s?

The Review

While the premise of The Christmas Murder Game scratches the itch for a richly dark Christmas-themed thriller, the execution falls flat. Benedict’s writing is so hamfistedly melodramatic, and her characters are painfully one-dimensional that it could only be saved by a really stellar puzzle—forward mystery—and that’s a disappointment as well.

The Christmas Murder Game book is chockful of poorly disguised anagrams and rather amateurish clueing that never reached the promised potential described on the book cover. Writing clever clues and a compellingly clever locked-room mystery requires a level of mastery Benedict has yet to achieve. Puzzle lovers, stick to Umberto Eco’s books, and don’t bother asking for The Christmas Murder Game under your tree this year. The Christmas Murder Game has clumsy, childish prose, bland characters, and a wholly unsatisfying murder hunt mystery.

The Christmas Murder Game‘s one saving grace is that the reader does find out what happened to Marianna by the end of the book. Is it as mysterious as advertised? No. I hope the premise outlined by Benedict is done more artfully and to better success by another author.