The Christmas Murder Game by Alexandra Benedict

Published: September 30, 2021
Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press
Author: Website
Info: Goodreads

The annual Christmas Game is afoot at Endgame House, the Armitages' grand family home. This year's prize is to die for--deeds to the house itself--but Lily Armitage has no intention of returning. She hasn't been back to Endgame since her mother died, twenty-one years ago, and she has no intention of claiming the house that haunts her dreams.

Until, that is, she receives a letter from her aunt promising that the game's riddles will give her the keys not only to Endgame, but to its darkest secrets, including the identity of her mother's murderer.

Now, Lily must compete with her estranged cousins for the twelve days of Christmas. The snow is thick, the phone lines are down, and no one is getting in or out. Lily will have to keep her wits about her, because not everyone is playing fair, and there's no telling how many will die before the winner is declared. (goodreads.com)

This entire review is going to be a spoiler. I won’t be able to talk about what I don’t like without giving away major plot points. So, if you don’t want to read that, I recommend skipping this review in its entirety.

I found THE CHRISTMAS MURDER GAME a complete dupe. The ending was so utterly disappointing for me that it completely soured the rest of the book.

Initially I was sucked into Lily’s story and her situation, and what could potentially unfold for the week and a half this game was going to play through. I liked the voice enough, if not being a little overwritten. But it was fine. Considering my bad luck with Christmas cozies this season so far, I was glad to finally settle into a book that I seemed to be enjoying.

The characters, from the beginning, felt very cookie cutter and meant to serve very specific purposes. As the story progressed and the characters didn’t change at all, I found myself getting bored with the lack of character growth and the seeming lack of response of the remaining characters to what was going on in the house. I mean, Lily was practically attacked in the kitchen and she just brushed it off like, “Huh. Who could have that been?” Obtuse to a level of plot device.

Gray was the quiet loner who was ruled by his bitch of a sister, Sara. There were the lesbians, Holly and Rachel, I think, whose sole purpose was to be lesbians. They didn’t really have any personalities to speak of. Tom was the overcaring counselor who tried to pathologize everything while simultaneously saying he didn’t want to do that. Reggie and Phillipa were as non-characters as the lesbians, serving as little more than plot fodder to get the murders going. And Lily was the depressed loner who was so weak-willed you could have driven a tractor over her and she would have thanked you for it.

Sara stood out immediately as the killer, but I knew, based on my mystery reading, that the most obvious character is not the killer. Immediate red herring. Except that was not the case here and why my disappointment in the book was so profound. From the second Sara stepped on page I knew I was supposed to look at her as the murderer, but it was likely someone else. Except it wasn’t. And I had such an ARE YOU KIDDING ME moment that the more I think on it, the angrier I get.

In fairness to the book, it was also Tom, who seemed to be the mastermind of their little duo operation and whose involvement I didn’t see coming. Because what kind of murder mystery would it be without first cousin incest? Honestly, I thought Sara was schtupping her brother, so it was a refreshing surprise to have a little familial distance in that relationship.

I’m not someone who can easily solve mysteries. I’m not that astute of a reader. Often I find that if I was able to figure it out pretty early on (say within the first half of the book), it’s not the most tightly plotted mystery. Therefore, since I had 50% of the murderers pegged from within the first 10% of the story . . . It was just so weak and so obvious that it wasn’t even enjoyable.

The little sonnets throughout, while cute, served no function other than to talk at the reader. As the reader, I had no knowledge of the tidbits hidden within those sonnets, so trying to solve them with the characters was impossible. I just had to wait for Lily to work her way through them and move me to the next chess square. My brain doesn’t really work for anagrams so I paid no attention to any of that and didn’t care to.

Lily turned out to be a damp paper towel of a character. Weak, no substance, and had everyone else around her doing the heavy lifting. It was clear from the beginning that Lily, at least, wasn’t going to die. The story’s told from her perspective. Not to mention you can see the story arc a mile away. She goes into the game wanting nothing to do with the house, only to want everything to do with the house by the end of it.

And this is to ignore the absurdity of continuing to play the game when people start dying. The absurdity that an entire group of people would not rip out Sara’s tongue five minutes into a conversation with her. And the absurdity that all of them would be so emotionally bankrupt that the ongoing deaths of their family really had no impact.

There was literally a house full of dead people by the end of it, and Lily and Isabelle were just casually talking about what Lily was going to do with the house now. Um, hello??? Is no one at all affected by the carnage??? Or is it all okay because they were all, on some level, shitty people?

And am I supposed to like Liliana? Because I’m not going to sit here and pretend that Sara’s a psychopath and Gray was a weak-willed weenie born from a vacuum. She was an absolute taint to her children and favored Lily so heavily that she didn’t care to even hide it. But she’s redeemed because she killed her own brother and sister-in-law to avenge her other sister’s murder? I’m not sure those things are tying together.

THE CHRISTMAS MURDER GAME was an incredibly shallow story that desperately grasped for depth and seriousness while mixing it with cartoon antics that only ended up creating a tonally dissonant mess that was unpleasant to read. Every character had exactly one personality trait and kept it the entire story. There was no character growth, the story was talked at me instead of immersing me in it, and resolved in a way that was incredibly disappointing and had me angry that I wasted hours reading this book. It had such a promising start, but the author was too focused on brain-twisting sonnets and jamming anagrams into her writing to focus on a more cohesive plot or characters with even a modicum of depth.

1.5