Snow falls, ghost stories are told by the roaring castle fire. It’s a cozy Christmas for sure, but a murderer hides, even here… A stand-alone Posie Parker novella, perfect for Agatha Christie fans!

Yorkshire, Christmas Eve, 1923.

Posie Parker, London’s premier female Private Detective, and Chief Inspector Lovelace of Scotland Yard have been invited to spend Christmas at Rebburn Abbey, ancestral home of the Earl and Countess of Cardigeon. It’s Christmas Eve and Rufus Cardigeon holds court, as each house guest is invited to share a personal mystery, but what unfolds turns out to be less a cozy cornucopia of fire-side Christmas cheer than a series of curiously interlinked and unsettling mysteries. But then, who promised that any of the tales had to be cozy?

Prepare for tales of unexplained murders, long-concealed mysteries, strange visitors in the night, and a secret in Posie’s own past, about her parents, which haunts her to this very day…

But something is afoot. Several of the guests are acting shiftily, and when a sparkling Christmas gift under the tree is revealed to be a ticking time bomb, designed to cause multiple murders and mayhem, Posie and Lovelace have to locate the perpetrator, fast. Who would want to cause such untold misery, and why?

Could it be, even at Rebburn Abbey on Christmas Eve, that the past can overshadow the present? Does the presence of evil lurk here? And what is wrong with the usually effervescent Dolly, Countess Cardigeon? Can the spirit of Christmas, or anything else, pull her from whatever ails her?

A delightfully twisty and stylish Christmas golden-age style mystery novella that fans of Agatha Christie, Downton Abbey and Lee Strauss will adore.

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Clare Wille

Voice