Page Turners – December 2025 review

The Christmas Murder Game by Alexandra Benedict was the Page Turners choice for December. This was published in 2021. It is a country house murder mystery taking place at Christmas and despite being set in the modern day is typical of its genre and very much within the style of Agatha Christie.

The cast of cousins is lured back to the family home with a hope of resolving the mysteries of the past and with the promise that if they solve all the clues and succeed in winning the game that has been set for them, they will become owner of the house. Soon a murder occurs and they find they are snowed in and, because the manager of the game asked them to surrender their devices, they have no contact with the outside world.

The backstory is complex, the protagonists are caricatures and the clues in the game are ridiculously convoluted but still the reader is drawn in. I particularly enjoyed the way the author uses so many Christmas themed adjectives, similes and metaphors and I thought this was very clever writing but I know that some of the other group members found this irritating. The book was divided into the twelve days of Christmas and had chapters within each day so there was no need to keep reading all night!

By the time I got to the fourth day of Christmas I had almost had enough of the storyline and characters and I thought another eight days would be too much. I was pleased to see that I was already over halfway through the pages and glad that the pace picked up.

The book included additional ‘entertainment’ in that anagrams of the twelve days of Christmas and the names of the author’s favourite Christmas books were hidden within the text – I only spotted one of them and I’m not sure that anyone else fared any better. However, I have had sufficient experience of the genre to enable me to spot some of the clues that led to the final revelations.

This book was an entertaining pre-Christmas read and counts as a page turner but I won’t be rushing to read another by the same author until next Christmas – she has written several other Christmas themed mysteries.

During this Christmas meeting, the group reviewed their books for the whole of the past year and the November choice of ‘The Women’ was probably the most highly regarded. Keep watching this space to see what we choose in 2026 and let us know if you would like to read any of our selections- we may be able to swap our page turners for one of yours.

Deborah Wallis