This was a good one, a young woman wakes up to find that she has be accused of attempted murder, but having no recollection of it. This one is about a man just out of prison with no real way to make money, so he decides to dress as Santa and raid a hotel. She soon though starts to recale going outside into the snow, and remembers the snowglobe in the house of her attacked neighbour. Val McDermid is a number one bestseller whose novels have been translated into more than forty languages, and have sold over eighteen million copies.

The advantage of short stories are that you can dip in and out of the book and read a story in between other busy moments in your social advent calendar. From a Santa Claus with a grudge to a cat who knows who killed its owner on Christmas Eve, these are stories to enjoy - and be mystified by - in front of a roaring fire, mince pie in hand. Cecily Gayford studied English at the University of Oxford, where she wrote her thesis on the 'golden age' detective stories of the 1930s and 1940s. Some of my favorites in this collection are: 'The Trinity Cat' by Ellis Peters that features a Church cat who may be the key witness in a murder.

But hurry… It's Christmas Eve and if you don't find the murderer in time, you won't make it home in time to spend Christmas Day with your loved ones! Of the whole the Trinity Cat and Footprint in the Sky , and The Four Seasons stand out as the most interesting. The Santa Claus Club by Julian Symons- in which Francis Quarles must figure out a locked room mystery that has Lord Acrise murdered during a dinner in plain sight. This is the third of the Cecily Gayford edited collections of Christmas crime stories I have read and, fo some reason I found it the most disappointing. Though there is a detective and his wife attend a murder mystery party, that has a MP who is trying to make it public who criminals, the detective clocks Santa.

Our investigation continues and a team of detectives are working at pace to establish what happened that resulted in a young woman losing her life,” he said.What hits home is that the Detective on the case has an unemployed wife at home who could very easily have been pushed to the same lengths as the suspect in custody. While the world sleeps, snow falls gently from the sky, presents lie under the tree … and murder is afoot. Possibly having as close a remit as crimes committed on one particular day is too limiting but I found the ten stories presented here lacklustre at best. An entertaining anthology of Christmas-themed mysteries, both from the Golden Age (like GK Chesterton and Margery Allingham) to more modern (Val McDairmid, Ian Ranken), and despite the title, not all of them involve actual murders!