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, please peruse my initial 20 Books of Christmas post, where I discuss the 20 books I’ll be reading over the 2024 holiday season.
The Story
Retired tobacconist turned amateur detective Mordecai Tremaine is invited to spend his Christmas holidays at Benedict Grame’s enchanting estate. Tremaine is promised a holiday ripped from a Dickensian novel: full of mince pies, mulled wine, and Father Christmas, of course.
Tremaine, a romantic figure, agrees to make the journey to Grame’s and help mediate a brewing melodramatic romance between Grame’s relations, which come with a tangled web of motives, including star-crossed lovers, a controlling guardian, and inheritance.
When Tremaine arrives, the house is already abuzz with various relatives helping trim the tree, piling up Christmas gifts, and delivering a Father Christmas costume. He observes that while everyone appears cordial, there’s a palpable atmosphere of unease in the house as everyone goes to bed on Christmas Eve.
The house awakens to Father Christmas dead under the glittering tree on a beautiful snowy Christmas morning. Mordecai Tremaine has his work cut out for him, untangling the motives to discover who killed Father Christmas in this old-fashioned, British holiday mystery.
The Review
Murder for Christmas is my first foray into Mordecai Tremaine’s adventures, and yet I felt like I knew who he was and what kind of detective he was without missing a beat. Tremaine is a self-professed romantic who reads the bodice rippers that might have ordained the bookshelves of your mother or grandmother. He’s a softer, feelings-forward protagonist who starkly contrasts Holmes’s acerbic attitudes. Maybe it’s his love of romance and the inherent empathetic qualities that make him uniquely privileged to solve the murder of Father Christmas.
Benedict Grame’s Christmas party is fraught with unspoken rebukes, building resentment, and simmering romantic interludes that erupt into murder. Tremaine is a man who appeals to his party guests because he is particularly non-threatening and has a sympathetic ear for them to pour out their emotional tumult. Like a kindly grandfather, he listens and dispenses advice and wisdom.
Tremaine’s velvet-handed approach seems genuine, but there is a touch of greed in his interest, he loves solving mysteries and wants to enjoy solving the murder of Father Christmas, which appeals to his sensibilities. This self-indulgent aspect of Tremaine’s nature rubs me the wrong way. He takes particular glee in the chaos and death around him; it’s a challenge he can’t wait to solve to prove he can. I don’t know if he has any moral qualms against crimes- they are just puzzles that amuse.
Since Murder For Christmas is my first mystery with Mordecai Tremaine, I am unsure if this is a subtle critique of people who read mysteries for entertainment. This exciting character flaw might or may not be explored throughout the series. Murder for Christmas makes good use of presenting a person or motive as one way and then revealing the opposite to be true- however, this technique is called out explicitly by one of the characters in speaking with Tremaine at the beginning of the boo,k. Hence, it makes the entire conceit of the book easy to unravel. I cottoned on to the killer and the way the murder was done early in the story because of this clue, but still enjoyed the read.
Murder for Christmas is a pleasant read. There’s young love, which is initially thwarted and then conquered; family is learning the true meaning of caring for one another, and there’s a rather persistent undercurrent of rage—even hatred—that Francis Duncan writes too well. It bites like the winter wind and adds enough of a deciding force to the story to add unpredictability to the characters and their true motives.
Murder for Christmas is a mystery that really heightens and plays with tropes of romance novels and leans into the romantic nature of Christmas mythology. If you are a lover of sentimental, character-driven mysteries, you will enjoy Murder for Christmas a lot. The narrative is so character-driven that it delves deep into the depth and complexity of the characters, making the story more engaging and intriguing.
I found Mordecai Tremaine to be a bit much for me—he’s mushy and shrewd in an exciting way that I ultimately found off-putting. Duncan created a well-crafted mystery that I would have liked better if he hadn’t felt the need to ensure that I, the reader, knew it was clever and well-written. Overall, I liked Murder for Christmas, but it’s a bit of a mixed bag for me, and I’m curious what the rest of the books in the series are like.
#20BooksOfChristmas Reviews
Golden Age of Detective Fiction 
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