Oh, the problems of being a blogger who does both a Book Of The Month post and a Review Of The Year one. When do you post them? What happens if I finish Poison For One after posting the first one but before the second?

Yeah, it’s not a real issue, is it? So let’s take a look at December 2017 on the blog and decide which of the eleven books takes the Puzzly for this month and goes into the… drumroll… Grand Puzzly of 2017.

The books in question were:

• Front Page Murder by Peter Bartram
• Invisible Death by Brian Flynn
• Into The Thinnest Of Air by Simon R Green
• Dancing Death by Christopher Bush
• Devil’s Wolf by Paul Doherty
• Checkmate To Murder by E C R Lorac
• Portrait Of A Murderer by Anne Meredith
• And Cauldron Bubble by Brian Flynn
• Fire, Burn! By John Dickson Carr
• So Much Blood by Simon Brett
• The Sea Mystery by Freeman Wills Crofts

An odd month. Most of the books were enjoyable, with one or two major exceptions – naming no names, but one of them does feature an alien sleuth – but there were three major standouts, namely, The Sea Mystery, Devil’s Wolf and Invisible Death. Well, in part due to the lack of a cover for Invisible Death and in part due to a delightfully simple impossible poisoning method that I’ve not seen before, the Puzzly goes to Devil’s Wolf, the latest mystery for Sir Hugh Corbett and, I think, one of Paul Doherty’s finest, a delightfully complex tale.

So, be back tomorrow for the review of the year and see if Devil’s Wolf can walk off with the the Grand Puzzly for 2017…