COLIN STEELE reviews a couple of books with lots of spooky Christmas twists.

Death Comes at Christmas, edited by Marie O’Regan and Paul Kane (Titan Books $39.99), delivers 18 short stories of Christmas murder and mystery. 

It opens with the CL Taylor’s story, How to Commit Murder in a Bookshop, which Taylor says was inspired by a Christmas party he attended at Waterstones bookshop in Swindon. He asked the attendees: “Has anyone written a story about a murder at a bookshop Christmas party? One day I will!”.

And then Taylor did. The end result is a story set in London’s largest and oldest bookshop, in which head bookseller Eleanor invites authors, publishers and publicists to solve a Christmas murder mystery game The game is going to be derailed, however, not just by the amount of wine, but by the intention of a once famous crime fiction writer to exact revenge on those responsible for his books falling out of favour.

The second story, Christmas Yet To Come by Helen Fields, spins off the characters Charles Dickens created in A Christmas Carol. It begins on Christmas Eve 1899 when Marley, the nephew of Jacob Marley, who had inherited his wealth, is walking through the corridors of the Marley Memorial Workhouse.

The now 68-year-old Tim Cratchit is worried that Marley’s sudden proposal of marriage to his daughter Adelaide has been accepted. Marley’s wife had died of malnutrition, which gives an indication as to the conditions of the children, hidden from the public, in the workhouse. Adelaide’s acceptance of the marriage proposal will, however, not turn out for Marley as he anticipated.

Vaseem Khan, the award-winning author of the Malabar House series, sees in Indian Winter, his main character Persis, India’s first female police detective, collaborating once more with Archie, an English forensic scientist. This time they are investigating and ultimately solving an intriguing locked room murder in a Bombay mansion on Christmas Day, 1950.

Less plausible is the murder motivation in both The Midnight Mass Murderer, although the setting in the English seaside town of Whitby at Christmas provides a suitably dark backdrop, and in Liz Mistry’s Secret Santa, in which the Christmas office party has a deadly outcome.

ACCLAIMED British horror nonfiction and fiction writer, Kim Newman in the novella, A Christmas Ghost Story (Titan Books, $26.99), delivers an initially dark tale of a haunted Christmas.

Single mother and self-published author Angie Wickings lives with her teenage son Russell, nicknamed Rust, in an isolated cottage in rural Somerset. Their Christmas begins strangely when the first advent calendar chocolate tastes strange and sinister Christmas cards arrive addressed to Rust, known for his Paraphenomena podcasts.

As their apprehension increases with each day’s calendar and card, Angie believes that what is happening resembles an episode in a TV series, The Cards, which she says she watched as a child in 1979. This featured a warlock, Mr Rooke, who kills the Spirit of Christmas. Unfortunately, Rust can find no evidence of this television series existing and worries about his mother’s sanity.

Strange events increase as “the dark days and long nights” to Christmas shorten. The power goes out in the cottage, Rust begins to decline physically, while the Christmas framework has cruels instead of carols, visits from the Merciless Gentlemen and the Jingle Basterds.

Is their reality being overturned by Angie’s memories, real or unreal? And then a portal to an alternate world opens. Can Angie and Rust escape back to normality before Christmas Day? 

Newman certainly keeps the reader’s attention in an intriguing Christmas novella.