When Sasha receives a call from her old university friend Gabby inviting her to spend Christmas at Gabby’s remote Scottish lake house, Sasha knows she shouldn’t go.

Twelve years ago, on Christmas Eve, when Sasha and her five closest friends were celebrating the festive season, something truly horrific happened that would change the course of their friendship forever. Something that meant Sasha hasn’t spoken to any of them since that night.

But Gabby is insistent that they all get together this Christmas, to finally help her move on from the events of that night, so Sasha agrees to go.

Arriving at the sprawling house overlooking a stunning loch, Sasha quickly realises that Gabby has other reasons for getting the six friends together this Christmas. And now Sasha is forced to relive a past she’s tried hard to forget.

People had always told them their friendship wasn’t healthy. That the six of them spent far too much time together. No good would come of it, they said. How could relationships with others work when the six of them were so tightly interwoven?

When a snowstorm isolates them from the outside world, old flames are rekindled and tensions run high, and it soon becomes obvious: nothing that big can stay secret forever.

I listened to ‘The Christmas Party‘ in a single sitting during a long, slow drive north through mist, fog and darkness. I think it was the only thing that kept me sane.

‘The Christmas Party‘ turned out to be a solid mystery, told mainly in the present day but with crucial flashbacks to the last time everyone had met, on Christmas Eve twelve years earlier. It’s a twist on the locked room mystery in that, if there was a murder, then the murderer is one of the six people currently snowed in at an isolated lochside house in Scotland. Add in a twist that one of the six has no memory of most of the party twelve years ago and so considers herself a suspect and this becomes a rubrics cube of possible murder suspects.

At the start of the story, I was concerned that this might be one of those “Haven’t I read this already?” stories, as the concept of a reunion that brings past evil-doings to the surface seems to have been done a lot recently. I’m glad to say that the storytelling in “The Christmas Party‘ soon showed me that my concern was unfounded. Kathryn Croft’s pacomg of the reveals in the story and the movement from the Now timeline to the Before timeline kept the tension high and the story moving forward. I liked that this wasn’t a story that depended on the extended foreshadowing of a single big reveal. It was a series of revelations, each one of which changed my understanding of the situation and the six people locked into it.

This is a story where all six of the players are liars. They all have secrets to protect. Their relationshjps, past and present, are complex and not always honest. Trust is in short supply, Guilt, grief, disappointment and anger are plentiful.

I didn’t like any of the six players much but they were all easy to believe in as flawed people trying to forget a terrible mistake. This was a satisfying mystery that held my attention to the end and delivered a resolution that made sense.