She would have liked to be a snowflake in the drifts that lined the road. An individual lost among many. She’d like to not be seen ever again in a whiteout of her own life. If she always felt cold, then she wouldn’t know when the sun wasn’t shining. [loc. 1267]
Lily Armitage is, despite her inclinations, spending Christmas at Endgame House, her late aunt's mansion in the snowbound Yorkshire Dales. It might be better if her aunt Liliana was still alive, or if Lily herself didn't associate the house with her mother's Boxing Day suicide in the maze twenty-one years ago. And it would certainly be better if Lily's cousins -- mean girl Sara, withdrawn Gray, brothers Tom and Ronnie, Rachel who's brought her wife Holly -- were less toxic.
Aunt Liliana hosted an annual Christmas mystery game, with twelve clues and twelve keys. Even dead, she is domineering, and this year's game goes ahead despite her recent death. The stakes are higher now, though: not only will the winner inherit Endgame House, but Lily believes that the mystery of her own mother's death will be explained.
And then the mysterious deaths begin ...
I certainly missed a lot of the allusions and playful references here: Benedict has woven in anagrams and titles of Christmas murder mysteries throughout. I'm not sure, either, that the clues can be decoded by the reader: for me, the interest was in watching the characters react to and interpret each of the sonnet-clues. Marvellously atmospheric, very wintry (Christmas cheer is unsurprisingly thin on the ground), and with some unexpected relationships revealed as the novel draws towards a close.
Many of the characters (especially Sara) are pretty unpleasant, and those who aren't actively nasty don't have a great deal to contribute to the plot. I'm not sure I liked Lily, but she's an interesting character: a designer of baroque dresses, bisexual, introverted, trapped in her memories.
I love Alexandra Benedict's writing, but didn't enjoy this as much as The Beauty of Murder or Jonathan Dark, or the Evidence of Ghosts: those novels had supernatural aspects and an unsettled ambience, while the horrors in The Christmas Murder Game are all human.
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