Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret by Benjamin Stevenson

 

Ernest Cunningham #3

208 pages

Publisher: Michael Joseph

Release Date: October 24, 2024

 

Blurb

My name is Ernest Cunningham.

I’m not a detective. I just happen to have a knack for what makes mysteries – and murderers – tick. I’d hoped, this Christmas, that any killers out there might be willing to take a break for the holidays.

I was wrong.

So here I am, backstage at the Christmas show of world-famous magician Rylan Blaze, whose benefactor has just been murdered. From the magician’s assistant to the hypnotist, my suspects are all professional tricksters. Masters in the art of misdirection.

My clues are even more of a mystery:

A suspect covered in blood, with no memory of how it got there.
A murder committed without setting foot inside the room where it happens.
And an advent calendar. Because, you know. It’s Christmas.

Solving the murder is the only gift I want this year. But can I catch a killer, and make it home for Christmas alive?

 

Review

Ernest Cunningham can’t stay away from murders, it would seem. After Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone and Everyone On This Train is A Suspect he is back for a third instalment when his ex-wife Erin asks for his help. Her partner has been murdered and she is found with blood on her hands without having any idea how it got there. And, as if one impossible murder isn’t enough, it isn’t long before magician Rylan Blaze is decapitated by a blade made of paper. With only a few days until it is Christmas, Ernest is, once again, up against it.

“I’m not a private investigator. I just happen to have a knack for understanding how mysteries tick, provided they follow the rules set out by the classics, of course.”

As was the case in the previous two books, the narrator in this story is Ernest Cunningham himself and he often addresses the reader directly. In fact, he plays a game with the reader, providing them with all the clues needed to solve the mystery without actually pointing them out. In other words, plays fair and according to the rules set by the writers of the Golden Age of Mystery.

“You’ll find no hidden clues or unreliable narrators here. My job is to relay to you everything you need to reach the same ‘lightbulb’ moment I did.”

And, because we’re dealing with a Christmas mystery, the story has a seasonable flavour:

“…this whole thing’s best treated as an advent calendar. Twenty-four chapters hold twenty-four clues and various bits and bobs that help me with the case. Well, twenty-three clues and a killer.”

Readers with great self-control could treat this book like an Advent calendar and read one chapter each day starting December 1st. I like that idea, but I wouldn’t have been able to limit myself like that. There’s too much happening and the use of cliffhangers at the end of each chapter pushed me straight from one chapter into the next one. In fact, I found this book all but impossible to put down. Ernest’s chatty narration pulled me along and had me swiping through the pages as fast as I could. The cast of characters was fascinating and the possible motifs for murder kept me guessing until Ernest revealed all in the rather spectacular denouement. Did I pick up on all the clues? No! Did I figure out whodunit? Also, no! But did I thoroughly enjoy myself while reading this book? Absolutely!

If you’re looking for a captivating, well-plotted, at times laugh-out-loud funny, and faultlessly executed mystery this Christmas, you are probably looking for Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret.

Miss Beeton’s Murder Agency by Josie Lloyd

 

Miss Beeton Mysteries #1

384 pages

Publisher: HQ

Release Date: October 24, 2024

 

Blurb

Alice Beeton never meant to wind up single and childless on the wrong side of fifty. Like her distant relative Mrs Beeton – yes, that Mrs Beeton – she had hoped to have her own spic-and-span household by now. In reality, she lives in an immaculate but dingy basement flat in a rather shabby block in Kensington with Agatha, her fiercely intelligent, if rather over-territorial, corgi-Jack Russell cross.

Now Alice runs the Good Household Management Agency, providing discreet domestic staff to extravagant townhouses and sprawling country piles. So when Camille Messant calls in urgent need of a new housekeeper, Miss Beeton sends out new hire Enya. She’s rather forward but she does come with impeccable references and is fluent en français.

But in the early hours of New Year’s Day, Alice is rudely awakened with the news that Enya has been found dead. As the police struggle to drum up an adequate investigation and the wealthy family and their party guests close rank, Miss Beeton takes it upon herself to solve the crime…

 

Review

Alice Beeton is a distant relative of the Miss Beeton of Miss Beeton’s Book of Household Management fame. She runs the Good Household Management Agency providing domestic staff to the rich and famous. When she employs a new hire named Enya on the same day that she is asked to provide the Messant household with a housekeeper immediately, it seems too good to be true. When, only a few days later, Enya is found dead, Alice Beeton feels responsible. With the police investigation not going anywhere, Alice decides to do some investigating of her own. After all, she’s a huge fan of murder mysteries. How hard can it be to unmask a murderer?

Alice with more than a little help from her friends Jinx, Helly, Barney, Jacques, and Massoud, to name but a few, soon discovers that investigating a crime is much harder than it looks between the covers of a book. And much more fraught with danger too. Going undercover in the Messant household to replace Enya, Alice Beeton finds herself taking risks and not getting anywhere fast. But, as she reflects 49% into the book: “Being stuck in the middle was part of the process.”

There’s a lot going on in this book apart from the murder which is not surprising since this appears to be the first book in a planned series which means that several characters and back stories had to be established. If I’m honest, it was a bit (too) much for me at times. More than once, I found myself wondering ‘who are you again?’ about secondary characters and some plot developments were outrageous enough that I found myself rolling my eyes. At the same time, the writing is smooth, and the story was intriguing enough to keep me turning the pages.

There are recipes in this book, some going back to the original Mrs. Beeton and others more modern. These recipes are placed right behind the place where a dish is mentioned right in the middle of chapters, and I’d love to tell you more about them. Unfortunately, the formatting of the ARC the publisher provided me with meant that they were literally unreadable. That is a shame since most of the dishes mentioned in the story sounded very yummy and I wouldn’t have minded trying my hand at recreating one or two of them.

Overall, this was a fast-paced, thrilling mystery, and captivating crime-caper with a few too many wtf moments for me to rate if five stars. If you like your cosy mystery with a large dose of mayhem, a host of larger-than-life characters, a cute little doggo, as well as plenty of action, and you don’t mind suspending disbelief once or twice, you’re going to love Miss Beeton’s Murder Agency.