The Christmas Eve Murders - Noelle Albright ****

This is the last of my Christmas murder mystery reviews for this year (though there will be more crime). It's a very engaging, if distinctly implausible story.

The implausibility is a result of the contrived setting. Maddie, a Scottish journalist working in Manchester is heading home for Christmas, but when her car breaks down she gets stranded in a pub in the Yorkshire Dales in a heavy snowstorm. During an in-pub treasure hunt, one of those present gets murdered - in effect it's a classic country house murder mystery with a modified setting. What makes the situation more than a little contrived is that there happen to be a DI and his detective constable sidekick in the pub, so they can contact an investigation (with Maddie's help) while they're snowed in.

Once you get past this unlikely setup (plus one weak restriction of which more in a moment) though, Noelle Albright keeps the action going in good page-turning fashion. For the first few pages the writing tends to be a little over-descriptive - and the central character is surely in the wrong job as she is wary about almost everything - but once the action starts, Albright has a steady hand in building the tension and surprises. It helps that the pub has enough secret passages to keep every old house mystery lover happy.

To make the isolation work in our modern, connected world we had to have a location with no phone signal (perfectly realistically given it's the Yorkshire Dales) and that would have no landline or internet connection - this latter part was necessary, but provides that weak restriction as Albright simply has the killer cut the phone wire. We had this happen when I was at university and an over-enthusiastic audience member at a punk gig ran amok through the building cutting the phone lines for no obvious reason. It took about 10 minutes for me to fix our phone. If instead the author had made use of a smashed fibre broadband box it would have worked far better - but I admit this is a picky complaint.

The book is described as a 'hilarious and cosy festive murder mystery' - there was no obvious humour here apart from some tension-breaking jokes between characters, but there is certainly an element of cosiness and it gets full marks on both festivity and mystery. I surprised myself by enjoying it far more than expected, always wanting to read the next chapter.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

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