Around Christmas, a good murder mystery goes down well - and all the better if it's set at Christmas time. I've got mixed feelings about this one. It's an entertaining premise - various family members stuck in a country house, with a clue to solve on each of the twelve days of Christmas. The winner of each gets a key, one of which will take them to a secret room where they can claim the title deeds of the house. And the book is reasonably readable. But there are some issues. The first person central character, Lily, spends far too long agonising over life, the universe and everything. In fact, she's a bit of a misery. Right at the start she is given a way to just have the house and end the whole thing, but doesn't bother for no obvious reason. Meanwhile, the storyline, which involves several deaths without anyone doing much about them, seems far-fetched to say the least. The 'clues' in the form of a sonnet a day are pretty much unguessable by the reader. And

There are broadly two types of urban fantasy. Ones where the setting is primarily the normal world, intruded on by the fantasy - think, for example, of fantasy books where conventional police officers investigate supernatural crimes - and ones where there is a parallel magical society. The latter was the case with the Harry Potter books, and is also what we find in Benedict Jacka's excellent Alex Verus books. This series, beginning with Fated , is now complete with Risen , its twelfth title, which seemed an excellent point to review it. I was a touch suspicious about this 'new master of magical London' tagline that appears on some of the books - apart from anything, I'm fed up with urban fantasy books set in London. But Jacka gives us something genuinely original. This is a society where the small, magically endowed subset of the population is impressively self-centred. I'd go so far as to say that most of them are psychopaths. But the central character, Alex Verus