A classic setting,an enchanting English village with well defined residents and of course murder! Luckily Mordecai Tremaine is visiting some friends in this village and as an amateur sleuth he is more than willing to lend a helping hand to inspector Boyce. It is a nice classic detective story but perhaps a bit long winded (and some clues were not very hard to miss!!)

NO one could have foretold how it was going to end.

Not even the murderer.

Well, that's not quite true... I had the murderer picked out @41% and even had a hunch about the motive ... because the setup of this story reminded me of a Graham Greene story.

The downside of all this was that the following 59% of the book were pure tedium.

It is a shame because the Preview of the book, where we get a snap shot of the discovery of the victim before the story has even been set up, made for fun reading. Unfortunately, the actual story was riddled with excruciatingly over-written internal monologue, and no reference to Dickensian characters or attempts at a Poirot-like MC could make up for it. 

Book themes for Las Posadas: Read a book dealing with visits by family or friends.

Christmas house parties were definitely "a thing" with the Golden Age mystery writers -- small wonder since they are, in essence, nothing but a seasonal subspecies of the subgenre that, perhaps, has come to be more synonymous with Golden Age detective fiction than any other subgenre: the country house mystery.  So it's no surprise that Francis Duncan, who published some 20 mystery novels between the 1930s and the early 1950s, but who was quickly and thoroughly forgotten after his books had fallen from favor,* turned to the subject as well, sending his amateur detective (and retired tobacconist) Mordecai Tremaine to the English countryside to attend the Christmas party of wealthy Benedict Grame.  But what begins like a true-blue Dickensian Christmas extravaganza, with Grame doing his level best to mime the likes of Samuel Pickwick and Mr. Fezziwig (Father Christmas / Santa Claus suit, presents on the Christmas tree, and all), in due course inevitably turns into a ghastly crime scene.  The victim is Grame's closest associate; a man whom some, but by far not all of those present seem to have a reason to dislike, but who to Tremaine seemed decidedly more "on the level" than some of the other guests, who had exhibited an unexplicable tension even before, and whose nerves now seem to resemble bow strings a fraction of a second before breaking point.

Few of the party's guests actually struck me as likeable -- but while I would have been quite happy to live with this in and of itself (which is, after all, par for the course of the average country house mystery), the solution 

considerably marred my enjoyment of the story, even if I had seen parts of it coming and my early suspicion as to the murderer's identity (though not their motive) turned out to be correct.

I own a print edition of this book, which I did pull for reference purposes on occasion, but I primarily listened to the deligihtful unabridged audio recording narrated by Geoffrey Beevers, who finds just the right tone for each situation and character.

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* As the Guardian reports, even his publisher no longer knew anything about him when Murder for Christmas was undusted and became a surprise revival hit -- it took for the author's children to see the book at their local Waterstone's to become aware of the publisher's appeal for information and get in touch with them.

A small independent chain here is shutting down one location, but it's in a pain in the butt area of town (probably why it's shutting) and I couldn't con MT into going with me (so he could sweat the parking).  Until today, when I got an email from them saying starting at 10am you could buy all the books that would fit into a box for $30.  He sighed heavily but grabbed his car keys.

We got there when they opened and they pointed to the boxes - they were big boxes.  If we didn't want to go the box route, everything was $2.  Snort - of course we wanted the box; we I was sooo gonna fill the box.

I tried.  It was my first "everything you can fit for $x" sale and it turns out with those parameters I was open to all sorts of titles I'd normally pass up.  MT picked out three books for himself in about 15 seconds (how???) and then ferried my stacks back to the register for me and generally hovered in that way only bored husbands and teenagers can do.

Once I'd been through every shelf, (hovering be damned) I ended up with 17 books.  I'd have gone for a second pass, but a combination of the vein in MT's forehead and the metered parking running out brought me to the register.  They packed the books into the box and there was an embarrassing amount of space left; I'm such a rookie.

Next time...

(I included the covers of the more interesting titles above, except the first three - those came in the post this week.)

I usually do a running tally, but I think I'm just going to leave it at the TBR pile got bigger.  ;)

Have a great weekend everyone.