{"id":3631,"date":"2024-04-25T22:02:04","date_gmt":"2024-04-25T22:02:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?p=3631"},"modified":"2024-05-12T23:23:48","modified_gmt":"2024-05-12T23:23:48","slug":"the-christmas-jigsaw-murders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?p=3631","title":{"rendered":"The Christmas Jigsaw Murders"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Benedict\u2019s many fans know that her Christmas mysteries (<em>The Christmas Murder Game<\/em> and <em>Murder on the Christmas Express<\/em>, both 2022) offer layers: they\u2019re great cozy-adjacent mysteries (a bit more violent than many cozies) that involve word and jigsaw puzzles, and they include puzzles that the reader can solve along the way (or not; the stories are complete without the \u201cside\u201d activities). In this title, Benedict tells readers to look for the titles of Fleetwood Mac songs sprinkled throughout the text (in honor of bandmember Christine McVie\u2019s 2002 death). Despite its lovable-grump protagonist, Edie O\u2019Sullivan, being a \u201cChristmisanthropist,\u201d the author has also tucked anagrams of Dickens\u2019 novels and Christmas stories into her family tale. The family is crossword setter and jigsaw enthusiast Edie\u2019s\u2014her current family, police-officer great-nephew, Sean, and his husband, who throughout the book are interviewing to be adoptive parents; Edie\u2019s former partner, Sky, around whom she has great regrets; and family from the past, whose loss has paralyzed Edie\u2019s Christmas spirit ever since. This year, she\u2019s forced out of her Scrooge zone when six jigsaw puzzle pieces are delivered to her home with a warning that \u201cFour, maybe more, people will be dead by midnight on Christmas Eve, unless you can put all the pieces together and stop me.\u201d Our heroine is on her toes as killings and more pieces ensue, as is Benedict\u2019s clever plotting and her writing\u2019s emotional heft. <strong>A great story for any time of year.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Benedict\u2019s many fans know that her Christmas mysteries (The Christmas Murder Game and Murder on the Christmas Express, both 2022) offer layers: they\u2019re great cozy-adjacent mysteries (a bit more violent&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":3630,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[85,55,67,56],"class_list":["post-3631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-review","tag-holidays","tag-mystery-detective","tag-traditional","tag-women-sleuths"],"featured_image_src":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/formidable\/4\/Jigsaw-400x400.jpg","featured_image_src_square":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/formidable\/4\/Jigsaw-400x600.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\/3631","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=3631"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3631\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3630"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}