December 19^th, and eighty-year-old Edie O’Sullivan receives the strangest Christmas present – a charity Christmas card and a box containing six jigsaw pieces. The pieces seem to show a crime scene – backed up with the sinister message: “Four, maybe more, people will be dead by midnight on Christmas Eve, unless you can put all the pieces together and stop me”, signed “Rest In Pieces”.

When a man is found near death with another piece of the puzzle in his hand, it is clear that this is a serious threat. Despite the help of her nephew DI Sean Brand-O’Sullivan, Edie is determined to keep some things to herself, not least the increasing number of pieces being sent to her. As the days until Christmas Eve decrease, can Edie solve the puzzle and find the killer first?

Well, that was interesting. Not sure interesting in a good way though, unfortunately. It’s very odd for a mystery to present itself as a puzzle – it’s in the title for goodness sake – and not actually be a fair play mystery. There are puzzles sprinkled throughout – Charles Dickens anagrams and hidden Fleetwood Mac titles are hidden throughout the text – but the actual whodunnit element isn’t something the reader can engage with.

The idea of using a jigsaw to drop clues to the killer’s plan is a decent one, but it doesn’t really work in a non-visual medium. A second disadvantage is that the clues lead to things that the reader doesn’t know about – for example an anagram leads to a street name that we don’t know anything about.

There are some good points – I thought the relationship between Sean and his husband Liam sidestepped the usual cliches and was done well, and Edie’s eventual redemption with Liam was good to read as well. Also, to be fair, the plot was interesting enough to keep me reading. But those were good flashes in a story that had a villain’s plan that made little sense – was Edie supposed to be a victim or not, for example? – and a protagonist who I found, for the majority of the book, pretty unlikeable.

Oh, and it’s not very Christmassy, either.

I quite enjoyed Alexandra Benedict’s first Christmas mystery, so I recommend taking a look at that, or come back in a month or so when I rank my Christmas reads from this year.

The Christmas Jigsaw Murders is out on November 9^th in ebook and hardback. Many thanks for the review e-copy – sorry that I didn’t like it more.