A Christmas Party

I wanted to read a Christmas mystery and I didn’t want it to be cheesy. This one met my expectations.

It is a classic English country house mystery, very much in the golden age style of detective fiction. The writing is witty and the characters are lively, which made it an entertaining read, but the plotting is slow and repetitive and the reader stays far ahead of the detectives for much of the novel.

I usually don’t mind having it all figured out by the end, but in this one the answer is so obvious and yet the detective keeps saying, “What can the answer be? I feel like it’s staring me in the face!”Tell me about it. Overall, it was a fun read but nothing exceptional.

On a side note, I have read a couple of Georgette Heyer’s romances too, and she’s a good writer of both romance and mystery, but one theme she seems to favor (spoiler?) is cousins getting together romantically, which bothers me since she wrote this in the 1940s. There’s an ick factor there and I don’t understand why they had to be related at all.