Nick Caldwell, a journalist, is heading home to his wife and baby daughter for Christmas when the worst snowstorm in English history descends and strands him in the middle of nowhere. Struggling through the endless white, he stumbles across Mistletoe Manor where the eight guests and two staff have settled in for the long haul. The wifi is down, the phones are dead… and, after another stranger stumbles through the door of the hotel, so is one of the guests, stabbed by the star on the Christmas Tree.

Trapped with a killer, Nick finds himself thrust into the role of sleuth. But as the bodies mount up, he has to find out why someone apparently has a grudge against people they have never met before…

Why this one, you might ask? The title makes it sound a bit twee. Well, I  was lured into buying it as a 99p Kindle bargain. After all, it’s Christmassy and Penguin assured me in very big print that

I was having a chat with my blogging buddies recently and said that I thought that the mis-labelling of locked room mysteries was on the wane. Guess I was wrong about that… This is a CLOSED CIRCLE mystery, Penguin, it’s not a locked room. If I’d paid more than 99p for it… well, I’m not sure as I did rather enjoy it, but it was still mis-sold to me! So, should I be cross that I was sort-of tricked into reading a decent book? That’s one for the moral philosophers out there, I guess.

Anyway, we’re back in the “victims snowed in together in a hotel” genre, and, as I said, it’s a pretty good example of it. The murderer is a bit creative with their methods – garrotting with fairy lights is a highpoint – and suspicion moves around the suspects. It never resorts to interrogation after interrogation, but the story constantly feels like its moving forward. Nick is never going to win prizes as a top sleuth, but that helps the murderer drag things out.

Having said that… I’m afraid, for me at least, halfway through the book my old buddy Captain Obvious popped round and stayed until the end. He’s a nice chap but he does tend to spoil things a bit. There are a few issues with the cluing here – the first reveal is clued about three or four times, but heavily enough that each separate hint was enough to reveal there was a past between two apparent strangers. That feeling of overcluing returns later on with too many mentions of a character related to the motive – they are mentioned so many times that they are clearly important and their importance did give away the killer. Add in a misdirect that is certainly in the top three clichés in crime fiction, and the final chapters had a feel of inevitability.

But that’s me, who’s read a ridiculous number of murder mysteries over my time on this planet. It is a well-written, enjoyable mystery where the plot keeps moving, and I wasn’t sure of the murderer until the aforementioned misdirect. I personally wouldn’t call it “cosy” and if you want something Christmassy, there are many worse things to spend 99p on. And F L Everett goes on the list of authors that I promise that I’ll come back to soon – this is a standalone, but there’s a series of wartime mysteries too.

One last thing – how much business does a hotel called Mistletoe Manor get in the other eleven months of the year, do you think?