On 19th of December, renowned puzzle setter, loner and Christmas sceptic Edie O’Sullivan finds a hand-delivered present on her doorstep. Unwrapping it, she finds a jigsaw box and, inside, six jigsaw pieces. When fitted together, the pieces show part of a crime scene – blood-spattered black and white tiles and part of an outlined body. Included in the parcel is a message: ‘Four, maybe more, people will be dead by midnight on Christmas Eve, unless you can put all the pieces together and stop me.’ It’s signed, Rest In Pieces.
Edie contacts her nephew, DI Sean Brand-O’Sullivan, and together they work to solve the clues. But when a man is found near death with a jigsaw piece in his hand, Sean fears that Edie might be in danger and shuts her out of the investigation. As the body count rises, however, Edie knows that only she has the knowledge to put together the killer’s murderous puzzle.
Only by fitting all the pieces together will Edie be able to stop a killer – and finally lay her past to rest.

The Christmas Jigsaw Murders‘ had all the things in it that should have given me a splendid seasonal mystery read: a prickly, mostly reclusive octogenarian crossword-setter turned reluctant amateur sleuth, a serial killer setting obscure jigsaw-based clues that our amateur sleuth must solve or see more people die as Christmas day approaches, complex clues, a high body count, a rich suspect pool, plot twists, deeply felt regrets, long-held secrets and echoes of ‘A Christmas Carol’.

Except it didn’t quite work.

The balance between all those ingredients was off somehow. Even though the humour in it often made me laugh and the clues were clever and the characters were colourful, the book felt stodgy. 

At the beginning, Edie engaged my attention. In her revamped Scrooge persona I found her spiky wit enjoyable and her isolation understandable. By the end of the book, the clumsily handled redemptive story arc had started to annoy me and I had no patience for tying up all the loose ends after the murderer is revealed and their motives and methods explained.

It’s not that this was a bad book. It wasn’t a book I thought about setting aside. It was like a Christmas cake that smelled better than it tasted.