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Review: Murder on the Christmas Express ***

This time of year I tend to read a much wider range of  books, so expect some random reviews. But one thing that will always feature over Christmas is a mystery - whether it's revisiting M. R. James ghost stories for the nth time, or a Christmas-themed murder mystery. This book certainly fits the bill with its deliberate reference to Agatha Christie's title, and Christmas thrown in.

The setting is somewhat less exotic than the Orient Express - here it's the sleeper train from London to Fort William - but there's the same opportunity for a tight band of suspects and there's the convenience of a train that gets derailed in a snowstorm, isolating the suspects and the detective - in this case a newly retired Met detective inspector, heading up to Scotland because her daughter's about to give birth.

Where this differs a lot from Christie is the impact of modern technology. So the detective, Roz Parker, is agonisingly kept up with the complications of her daughter's delivery, and the (first) victim is a social media influencer, which is an important factor in the storyline. We get a nice locked room mystery and increasing rebellion from the (mostly unpleasant) set of train passengers to fill out the action.

The book isn't bad, but apart from a couple of central characters, I found it difficult to get a picture of some of the others (there are four students, practising for an unlikely sounding cross between University Challenge and Big Brother, for example, who I had real trouble making anything other than ciphers in my mind). The side story of Roz's life didn't really add to the main thread of the mystery plotting, and the prose could sometimes try a bit too hard.

For example, there are some strained similes - there's a midwife 'whose low, reassuring tones flowed like the warm water that filled a birthing pool'. Like many real passengers, Roz notices the glimpsed lives of people as the train passes their houses, but as she 'became aware of thousands of parallel lives', she feels that 'Like every small part of the train, each life was integral. Essential.' Really? This observation is then extended to wildly misunderstand Schrödinger's cat with the thought that 'Each box of a window with its blinds or curtains could contain an atrocity. Schrödinger's casement.' 

I lived with this - it was never hugely intrusive, but the thing that finalised my mixed feelings about the book was the ending. There's an interesting twist at the end - but the reaction to that twist is to totally lose any sense of justice being done. It just felt wrong.

This was an entertaining enough story, with plenty happening and a couple of effective characters, but it could have been a lot better.

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