The Christmas Murder Game by Alexandria Benedict

A young woman is guilted by the final request of her deceased aunt into returning to her childhood home for one more round of Christmas Games. In the past, the Armitage children would solve puzzles during the 12 Days of Christmas in order to find their presents. But after the apparent suicide of her mother, Lily Armitage hasn't participated in the event in years. With the promise of revealing that her mom's death was in fact murder, Lily agrees to play the games one last time with her now adult cousins. The winner of the games gets the family mansion, which has been turned into a lucrative hotel. Lily just wants answers. However, someone is willing to kill off the competition for the home with no regard to helping Lily prove her mother did not commit suicide. Lily very well may have to win the game to not just get the answers she seeks, but to survive the holidays.

This very British holiday murder mystery that promises a number of games, some of which are interactive. One mission is for readers to find passages of the book turned into anagrams of the gifts from The Twelve Days of Christmas. I misunderstood the rules of that game thinking that the phrase 'A partridge in a pear tree' was hidden in Chapter One. So I spent way too much time analyzing every unusual looking sentence. It was getting really tedious going back and forth trying to determine if I was right or not. Once I found out that there wasn't a single line of the song in each chapter, I settled down and just enjoyed the book for the complex thriller it was.

This book is full of characters I liked- most of which died. This book also has a character that I absolutely despised. You'll have to read the book for yourself to determine if they lived or not. I kept going back and forth as to who the murderer was. At one point I thought it might be Lily doing the killing because her thoughts often would be expressed out loud in the next paragraph by one of the other characters. That train of thought got me thinking that maybe the whole thing is in Lily's mind. Alas, I must say, that sort of thinking is a red herring. 

To have a family member die and everybody keeps playing the games seemed a bit far fetched for me. The Armitage family get snowed in on the day of the first murder and of course, the phones go out and personal electronics and WiFi has been forbidden to prevent cheating in the Christmas Games. So I can understand why none of the characters make any attempts to go get the authorities as the nearest town is a long ways away. But I refuse to believe that a family, even as callous as the Armitages, would keep playing frivolous party games as the bodies begin to stack up.  Promise of inheriting an expensive home or not.

As much as I had difficulty with that aspect of the book, I kept on reading. I wanted to know more about these family mysteries that kept piling up. I'm pretty sure not all of them are ever fully uncovered. There's talk of one cousin who did something really bad to make them the black sheep of the family. But it's never fully explored. Another cousin has important things to tell Lily. Only they kick the bucket before saying what they know. Actually, I think this happened twice. 

Until I read this book, I didn't know that there was such a demand for Christmas set murder mysteries. However, it turns out that there are a bunch of such books. As I like a good mystery, I very much might consider making a holiday themed mystery novel a new annual Christmas tradition. (Actually, I read a Sherlock novel last year, so I guess I have already started such a tradition.) As much as this book had some implausible elements to it, this work by Alexandra Benedict did get my attention and it kept it throughout its whole 288 page length. Definitely a guilty pleasure sort of thing full of mind benders, deceits and a healthy dose of anglophilia. A passing knowledge of music theory helps. Though as I'm not very good at reading music or playing instruments, I was at a bit of a disadvantage there.

Worth Consuming!

Rating: 8 out of 10 stars.

Great Quicksolve Whodunit Puzzles

I'm always surprised by how much death and violence and mayhem is within a mystery solve book for young readers. Encyclopedia Brown isn't that bad an offender. But Donald J. Sobol's other books- Two-Minute Mysteries, are filled with a bunch of victims. Jim Sukach's Dr. Quicksolve books are no exception.

The small town detective and his son Junior are on the scene of over two dozen crimes including stabbings, assaults and robberies. There's even a couple of mysteries involving the CIA and a trio of crimes involving the tragic demise of a 1960s rock band.

Most of the solutions were pretty easy to solve. A couple were quite tricky. And one or two had a solution that I just disagree with. To go into it further would bring about massive (and unforgivable) spoilers. So all I will say is that speculation and not fact are how Dr. Quicksolve arrives at 1 or 2 of his deductions. Sadly, poor detective work is rubbing off on the next generation as one of Junior's mysteries is solved by a 'guestimate' and not proven fact!

Seems a little unfair to me. But I am sure that's what happens in the real world too!

Two sections in this book involves a series of mysteries being grouped together. The first one had a one page set-up that took me a few minutes to figure out. It looked just like the other mysteries with a header and an illustration. But there was no blurb explaining to the reader about what aspect of the crime there was to solve. So when you get to this section of the book, don't do like I did and think that there is a page missing or a printing error. There's not. It's a transition that is just not presented to the reader very well.

While I thought that some aspects of this book had a little too much creative license, I did like how the solutions don't go in order. The solution for mystery #1 might be on page 95 and the solution for mystery #2 might be on page 88. This prevents over-eager sleuths from cheating. This was an innovation that I thought was greatly superior to those mysteries of Encyclopedia Brown. But that's about all that this book does better than the kid detective. 

Rating: 6 out of 10 stars.

The Sherlock Holmes Puzzle Collection

  When I found this book, I was so excited. I have been on a Sherlock kick recently having discovered the Benedict Cumberbatch series on PBS. So when I found this puzzle book, I thought I would get to be like the famous detective and solve some crimes.

  The book is setup just like the original novels by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle with Dr. John Watson as the narrator. This time, the prose is in the form of Watson's notebook containing some of Holmes lesser known ( and so extent, less exciting mysteries- unpublished of course!) With the answers in the back, I thought that this would be like Donald J Sobol's Encyclopedia Brown series that I adored as a kid. (who am I kidding, I still do!) Yet I would have to venture that about 75% of this book reads like the SATs!

   With complicated word plays, lengthy math problems, logic puzzles, and blasted fractions, this book was hard. It didn't help that these puzzles get more and more difficult as the book progresses. Plus, some of the more tricky puzzles unfairly require the reader to have a general knowledge of life in Victorian England in order to solve them.

  By the end of the book, these contests were so difficult to even comprehend that I was pretty much rushing through them. I was that flustered with this book. I think you've got to be a member of MENSA to enjoy the second half of this book. And if you aren't, you’re going to need a pen, paper and possibly a calculator and dictionary to solve them.

  I enjoyed the artwork, some of which were original pieces by Sydney Paget, illustrator of Doyle's stories when first published in London's The Strand magazine. This is a lovely little book for serious Sherlock enthusiasts but for a comparative novice of Holmes and Watson like me, it's going straight to a used bookstore for trade credit.

Rating: 5 out of 10 stars.