Mordecai Tremaine is invited to spend Christmas at Benedict Grame’s country retreat for his annual Christmas party. The festivities are full of Christmas cheer until an extra present is found under the Christmas tree—a dead body.

This book was a little slow to start and it took a while for me to be able to keep all of the characters straight. I don’t know if I wasn’t paying enough attention the first time each character was introduced or if it was just slightly confusing with there being so many people. It could have also been because of the different variations of a person’s name that were constantly used: first name, last name, and first and last name.

Anyways, once I got a handle on things, I quite enjoyed this book. Every person had that one thing that made them look guilty so I really had no idea what happened until the very end. I enjoyed making highlights and marking clues to try to figure out what happened. The ending was good and a total surprise because there was a lot more going on than just murder. I am slightly disappointed because I thought there was going to be a big confrontation and accusation made in front of the whole house or town, but that’s not what happened. And then the book just ended, so I never got to see everybody else’s reaction to what happened. That being said, I’m not totally mad about how abrupt it ended, and I would definitely read another Mordecai Tremaine book.

As far as Christmas spirit goes, this was probably a 3 out of 5 Christmas trees. The whole setting was very wintery and Christmassy. They had a Christmas Eve dinner and festivities, and the Christmas tree played a pretty big part in the story. But…you know…Santa got murdered.

Despite this book being 4th in a series, I didn’t have any trouble keeping up with it, having not read the first three books.