Christmas can be stressful for some people – and if you’re on your own, it can be unbearable. Maude Daneson runs a boarding house in London, and in an effort to combat that stress and loneliness, invites everyone in the house for Christmas dinner. It’s a lovely seasonal gesture, but for one guest, it just might be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

Because London is plagued by a serial killer, someone for whom the red mist has been descending more and more frequently as Christmas approaches. A push on a train platform, a judicious use of a can of fake snow sprayed into someone’s mouth, there’s no rhyme or apparent reason for their attacks, but when opportunity presents itself. And what better opportunity than the carving knife at Christmas dinner?

A recommendation from Brad, he of the Ah Sweet Mystery blog fame, for a Christmas mystery to go with my season of festive murder and mayhem. There’s so many new titles out this year – I’m not going to cover them all, just those I can get my hands on – but I fancied taking a look at some older ones.

This is certainly Christmassy, with everything building up to the climax at Christmas dinner. The book follows three strands, the lives of the people in the boarding house, the investigations of some near-psychic policeman and the thoughts of the killer.

Now, I’m not a fan of “thoughts of the killer” sections usually, but these are quite fun. The killer may be a psychopath, but generally they don’t realise it – it’s only when the headaches come that things get out of hand, and even then, there’s no clear indication that the murderer knows exactly what they’ve done.

The sections on the household focus primarily on the owners, although everyone gets a look-in at some point, mostly to drop in the fact that they often get headaches. The police bits are fun too, although as I said, they seem to be acting on instinct – someone is suffocated with fake snow, another is possibly pushed in front of a train, so obviously it’s the same person…

All in all, it’s a fun read, although it does lean more into the stresses of the holiday season rather that the comfort and joy. It does stumble at the ending, where the killer is revealed when they try and kill someone and, as far as I can see, it could have been anyone in the house. If there were clues that pinned down the killer, I missed them, and the choice isn’t a desperately interesting one.

Still, it’s a fun, relatively short, read and certainly holds the tinsel crown for “Most Christmassy Mystery” so far…