Meg’s sister-in-law, Delaney, is pregnant. Since her due date is on or around Christmas Day, this is putting a bit of a damper on the usual holiday festivities. Meg and Michael are NOT hosting the usual house full of relatives and parties. Instead, Meg, along with her mother, her grandmother, her cousin Rose Noire, and her good friend Caroline, are militantly doing everything they can think of to keep Delaney quiet and healthy. All the relatives are farmed out to friends and neighbors; all the parties are being held somewhere else; and while Delaney is bored and mutinous, she’s doing well, and they’re managing to maintain a serene, peaceful environment for her . . . until a body is found in Meg and Michael’s yard.

The body turns out to be an attendee at Presumed Innocent, a nearby conference that Meg’s grandmother has organized. Some of the attendees want to learn how to exonerate a friend or family members who has been unjustly convicted, while the rest are avid true crime aficionados. And since the dead guy has been very vocal about his belief that most actual and would-be exonerees are guilty, guiltyGUILTY!, nearly everyone at the conference dislikes him. But would any of them hate him enough to kill him? And can Meg still keep Delaney calm in the middle of a murder investigation, all while trying to catch the killer?

IN A NUTSHELL
This was my fourth year reading a Meg Langslow Christmas mystery as part of reading my way into the Christmas spirit. My expectations were high. Sadly, ‘Rockin’ Around The Chickadee‘ disappointed me. I was expecting a bit of Ho! Ho! Ho!. All I got was ‘ho hum’. From about the 40% point, when the dead body was discovered, the energy in the book started to flag and never recovered. There was a lot of padding. Way too much of Meg going through every possible scenario before discounting them all. And endless, tedious explanations of technicalities of things that are mostly common knoweldge to anyone who reads crime novels. By the last hour of this nine-hour book, I was checking to see how much more I had to sit through before we were done.

 Initially, I thought the plot of ‘Rockin’ Around The Chickadee‘ was a welcome departure from the normal chaotic Christmas with the Langslow’s. The big family gathering has been replaced by a conference on overturning unjust convictions. The mystery seemed solid. When the body was discovered, it was hard not to give way to the idea that the person had finally gotten what they deserved. The suspect pool included almost everyone at the conference – mostly True Crime fans and convicted murderers whose verdicts had been quashed. Meg seemed to have managed to get herself involved in the investigation without pushing the sheriff to one side. I thought I was in for a fun mystery. I was wrong.

This was a much more serious book than the other Meg Langslow Christmas mysteries that I’d read, mostly because it was focused on the real-life issue of the high number of wrongful convictions in the justice system. There were flashes of humour and various family members were called upon to contribute to solving the mystery but the storytelling soon started to drag.

There were lots of overlong explanations and very little action. The occasional moments of merriment were overwhelmed by Meg constantly telling me what had occurred to her rather than showing me what was going on and letting me work out what it might mean. The stuff on wrongful convictinons dropped into lecture mode too often. Uncharacteristically, Donna Andrews devoted more time to larding in her legal research and sharing Meg’s theories on what might be happening than describing what the people in the story were up to. Eventually, even Bernadette Dunne, the narrator, seemed to be struggling to with the tediousness of the material.

The bones of the plot were better than the delivery. The mechanics of committing the murder while remaining unseen were clever. I didn’t guess who the murderer was (although, before the end, I no longer cared), For me, the plot was spoiled because Meg, even after all her theorising, didn’t discover the murderer. Instead, the murderer, in a hard-to-credit error of judgement, disclosed themself to Meg.

If this had been my first Meg Langslow Christmas Mystery, there wouldn’t have been a second.