The Twelve Days of Murder by Andreina Cordani

315 pages

Publisher: Zaffre

Release Date: October 26, 2023

Netgalley

 

Blurb

 Find the truth. Solve the murder. Never reveal your secret.

 Twelve years ago, eight friends ran an exclusive group at The Murder Masquerade Society. The mysteries they solved may have been grisly, but they were always fictional - until their final Christmas puzzle, when one of the group disappeared, never to be seen again.

Now, the remaining members receive an invitation to a reunion masquerade, to be held in a beautiful and remote country house in Scotland. The game begins, and it feels just like old times.

Until the next morning, when Lady Partridge is found hanging from a pear tree.

It quickly becomes clear that in this game, the murder will be all too real, and the story is bringing long-hidden secrets to the surface. If they hope to survive the festive season then they will need to face the truth about what happened on that fateful night twelve years ago.

 

Review

If I had to summarize this book in one sentence, I’d say: The Secret History meets And Then There Were None. The group of students who form the Murder Masquerade Society are all rich and confident. All of them, that is, except for Charley. As a result, Charley always felt like an outsider, although that never stopped her from participating.

The last time the Society got together twelve years ago, one of them, Karl, disappeared without a trace. He was the organiser of their murder games. He was also the appointed victim for that particular game. While the locked room in which his body should have been found did contain the (fake) blood smears and other clues, no sign of Karl could be found. And after more than a decade it is still unclear what happened to him.

For twelve years the society has been dormant but now Karl’s twin sister Ali has invited all the participants to take part in another mystery game in a remote location. For reasons best known to those individual members, the remaining seven all return with one of them bringing an uninvited eight guest.

From the start, things are a bit off. For starters, there’s no sign of Ali, who is supposed to be in charge of proceedings. But matters don’t get really worrying until the appointed victim in the game, Lady Partridge, is found hanging in a pear tree. Her death being anything but pretend.

With a snowstorm isolating them from the outside world, the landline down, and their venue having no telephone reception or Wi-Fi, the survivors are on their own. But what is going on? Can they trust each other? And does enjoying fake mysteries mean they are also able to solve a real case?

The above made for a fascinating and fast-paced mystery, especially since Lady Partridge wasn’t the only victim. There is always something delicious about the friction between reasonable mistrust between the characters and the need to work together in order to survive. The fact that it isn’t immediately clear whether what is happening is in some way related to Karl’s disappearance or a new ordeal adds to the tension. And there’s some wonderful character development in this book, especially where Charley is concerned.

For obvious reasons, I can’t say a whole lot more about the story. I will therefore limit myself to stating that I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The mysteries were truly mystifying, and the solutions were mostly satisfactory. I’m just not sure the reader was given entirely enough information to work out (part of) the solution along with Charley. With that in mind, I still highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys an original murder mystery that will have them scratching their heads for the longest time.