Murder She Wrote: A Killer Christmas by Terrie Farley Moran, Jessica Fletcher * * *
The story is set in Cabot Cove during the holiday season, but here is the first odd choice. It does not begin at Christmas. It begins at Thanksgiving. From there, the book spends an extraordinary amount of time on preparations for a large, multi-day Christmas festival. Committees are formed. Meetings are held. People sign up for tasks. Schedules are discussed. Decorations are planned. You are there for all of it. Every step. Every organisational detail.
At first, this is actually quite pleasant. There is something cosy and communal about it. It genuinely feels as if you are a member of the town, sitting in those meetings, nodding along, helping to plan this big festive event. That part works. It feels warm. It feels seasonal. It feels Christmassy in spirit, if not yet in calendar date.
Then you realise something else. You are halfway through an eight-hour audiobook and nobody has been murdered.
Around the four-hour mark, when you have listened to endless discussions about logistics and festive planning, the murder finally happens. And the reaction is less shock and more relief. Ah. So this really is a mystery after all. Unfortunately, that relief does not last long. The investigation itself feels oddly subdued. Jessica does some light sleuthing, follows up on a few clues, talks to people, thinks things through. But there is no real tension. No urgency. No sense of danger.
Worse, the mystery is painfully obvious. I had already guessed both the victim and the murderer before the murder even occurred, and I was completely right. There are no meaningful twists, no satisfying red herrings, no moment where the solution clicks into place in a surprising way. It simply unfolds exactly as expected, and then it is over.
What makes this more frustrating is how the book spends its time. Roughly seventy to eighty percent of it is devoted not to the mystery, but to Christmas festival organisation and to Jessica’s everyday life. She is also writing a book, so we hear about her research problems, her attempts to track down information. None of this is unpleasant, but it is not what I picked this book up for.
And then comes the biggest let-down of all. After all that build-up, after all that careful and lovingly described planning, you never actually see the Christmas festival. Christmas arrives, and the book more or less shrugs and says: it all went well, everything happened, it was fine. That is it. No scenes of the festivities themselves. No lights. No choirs. No food. No atmosphere. The payoff simply is not there.
It feels like being invited to help organise a party, doing all the work, and then being told afterwards that it was lovely and you would have enjoyed it. You never get to attend.
In the end, the murder is solved exactly as you expected, the town moves on, and the book quietly wraps itself up. I would not say this is a bad book. It is gentle, cosy, and comfortably familiar if you love Cabot Cove and enjoy spending time with Jessica Fletcher. But as a Christmas mystery, it is deeply unbalanced. Too much preparation, too little mystery, and a festive event that happens entirely off-page.
I would only recommend this to dedicated fans of Murder, She Wrote who want a low-stakes, low-tension holiday read. If you are looking for an engaging Christmas mystery with atmosphere, suspense, and a satisfying payoff, this one is likely to leave you standing outside in the cold, listening to the party from a distance.
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