{"id":2209,"date":"2022-04-07T23:17:52","date_gmt":"2022-04-07T23:17:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?p=2209"},"modified":"2023-03-11T18:45:13","modified_gmt":"2023-03-11T18:45:13","slug":"the-christmas-murder-game","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?p=2209","title":{"rendered":"The Christmas Murder Game"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>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\u2019s garden maze years before. The family is gathering for a final game, one that\u2019s stipulated in their Aunt Liliana\u2019s will: they\u2019re competing to win the house, and must solve one riddle per day over the 12 days of Christmas. Liliana\u2019s letter to Lily enticed the young designer\u2014known for making exquisite corsets\u2014to the showdown by promising that she would find out who killed her mother. That\u2019s not to be the last grisly death at Endgame, because as soon as the play is on, so is the killing, with Yorkshire\u2019s worst snow in years keeping the miserable contestants trapped. Paralleling the corsetry details are many other kinds of entrapment\u2014in the house, in childhood-throwback behavior that emerges when the cousins get together, and in Lily\u2019s feeling that she can never escape that moment in the maze. But there\u2019s 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. <strong>Just the ticket for next winter, alongside Mark Dunn\u2019s wordgame novel Ella Minnow Pea.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":2208,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[85,55,56],"class_list":["post-2209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-review","tag-holidays","tag-mystery-detective","tag-women-sleuths"],"featured_image_src":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/formidable\/4\/Xmas-Murder-400x400.jpg","featured_image_src_square":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/formidable\/4\/Xmas-Murder.jpg","author_info":{"display_name":"Henrietta Thornton","author_link":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?author=4"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2209"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2209\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}