Holidays

The backbiting Armitage family has a Christmas tradition at their country mansion, Endgame House: the matriarch of the family creates cryptic riddles for them to solve. Lily was best at the game in the past, until her cousins were so mean to her that she let them win. Now Lily is returning from London to Endgame for the first time since she found her mother dead in the house’s garden maze years before. The family is gathering for a final game, one that’s stipulated in their Aunt Liliana’s will: they’re competing to win the house, and must solve one riddle per day over the 12 days of Christmas. Liliana’s letter to Lily enticed the young designer—known for making exquisite corsets—to the showdown by promising that she would find out who killed her mother. That’s not to be the last grisly death at Endgame, because as soon as the play is on, so is the killing, with Yorkshire’s worst snow in years keeping the miserable contestants trapped. Paralleling the corsetry details are many other kinds of entrapment—in the house, in childhood-throwback behavior that emerges when the cousins get together, and in Lily’s feeling that she can never escape that moment in the maze. But there’s love trapped in this house too, and the word puzzles posed to the family (and anagrams listed in the foreword for readers to solve as they read the book) provide an intriguing and engrossing way to get to that warmth. Just the ticket for next winter, alongside Mark Dunn’s wordgame novel Ella Minnow Pea.

nitially, this novel seems weighed down by clichés: the weak, timid wife; the macho, type-A husband; the island rumored to be haunted. But keep going and you will be rewarded with a top-rate thriller which is nothing as it seems. Liam and Laura chose to spend their honeymoon on a remote Scottish island, empty except for the two of them. Their lovely cottage is stuffed with a week’s worth of fine foods and wine, and all they plan to do is explore the island’s ancient burial sites and ruined castle. Until things start to get weird—is someone in the bushes watching them?—and they wake to find a message scratched into the window. Clearly they aren’t alone, and their one way of contact with the mainland, a satellite phone, is missing its charger. Then the electricity goes out. From there, it’s clear that their stalker isn’t playing trick or treat, he’s out to murder them. You would expect this book to end with a face-off between the newlyweds and the villain, but a 180-degree twist ends up rewriting the whole book, leaving readers absolutely stunned.

The Christmas Murder Game

The Stalker