Christmas Day at Champton Rectory, the home of crime-solving Canon Daniel Clement. It’s Christmas, though, so murder won’t be paying a visit, will it?

As the house fills with the residents and guests of the village “big house”, along with Daniel and his mother’s invited guests, a day of merriment lies ahead. But at the end of the day, someone will be dead, and Daniel will once again be hunting for a murderer…

You may have noticed, it’s all been a bit Christmassy here on the blog recently. And why not? Sainsburys started it over a month ago with selling mince pies and Christmas puddings, so I’m just jumping on the old bandwagon. So far, it’s ranged from the excellent – Miss Winter In The Library With A Knife, The Dog Sitter Detective’s Christmas Tail and A Scrooge Mystery – the pretty good – Murder At Mistletoe Manor – and the odd, namely The Dead Of Winter (not remotely Christmassy) and The Merry Christmas Murders (for children but given the nature of the book, oddly lacking in clues). And then there’s this…

Don’t get me wrong, I do quite like this series. Book One suffers from odd pacing and Book Two from a lack of clues and a lot of plot that had nothing to do with the murder. And unfortunately, that trend continues here.

The murder happens so late in the narrative that you can barely call this a murder mystery and when it does happen, it’s not very interesting and dealt with necessarily quickly. If you want a book about a village household that has to host a massive Christmas party set in the eighties, then you might enjoy this. But if you want a Christmas murder mystery – and I rarely, rarely say this – just avoid this one. Despite it being a half-length novel, there are better Christmas mysteries out there – like all the ones that I mentioned above, or any of these below…