Murder on the Christmas express

For her surprisingly dark follow-up to 2021's The Christmas Murder Game, Benedict tears a leaf out of the Agatha Christie playbook and sets her tale on a posh locomotive full of suspicious Brits. The passengers aboard the sleeper train from London to Edinburgh for the Christmas holiday get a rude awakening when they derail in a remote, snowy section of the Scottish Highlands. Among the marooned are Roz Parker, a recently retired Metropolitan Police Detective who's on her way to visit her pregnant daughter; Mary, a self-described "crone" who's traveling with her doting son, Tony; Grant, a reality TV star; Meg, a social media influencer; and a team of college students preparing to audition for a popular quiz show. Shortly after the derailment, Meg is murdered, and Roz takes up the role of investigator, determined to ferret out the culprit before more innocent travelers die. While Benedict sticks to frothy Christie pastiche for a while, sprinkling the narrative with pub games and quizzes, cozy fans should be warned that the investigation takes a somber turn, introducing weightier-than-average themes of sexual assault into the mix. Still, strong prose and a bevy of plausible suspects keep things intriguing. Readers willing to embrace this Christmas story's jagged edges are in for a ripping mystery. Agent: Ruth Logan, Bonnier Books. (Oct.)

A surprisingly deeply felt adjunct to Benedict's aggressively brainy The Christmas Murder Game (2022). DI Rosalind Parker, who's parted ways with Lewisham's Criminal Investigation Division after 25 years, is on her way to Fort William, Scotland, to be with her very pregnant daughter, who's gone into labor during Christmas week. But the train, inspired, like so many other details here, by Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, is delayed by bad weather and then suffers a partial derailment that brings it to an abrupt stop in the middle of nowhere. As Heather Parker's fiancee, Ellie, relays the increasingly dire details of her delivery, Roz is flooded with unwelcome memories of her own experience giving birth to Heather only a few months after being raped while pregnant with her. Luckily, there are plenty of distractions aboard the train, where singer/influencer/exhaustingly oversized personality Meg Forth has been found dead, and her companion, a serial abuser who's the most likely suspect in her murder, Britain's Best Boyfriend star Grant McVey, soon follows. The surviving characters--including a family of six, a quartet of undergraduates vying for a spot on the quiz show Geek Street, an IT resource person at King's College London, and a Crown Prosecutor who has an unexpectedly close tie to Roz--are sadly less interesting. But that doesn't stop Benedict from raining down red herrings, plot complications, and false solutions, spiced up by a series of meta-games involving anagrams, Kate Bush songs, three rounds of a Christmas quiz, and the obligatory recipe. What stands out most, though, is how poignant the central situation is, once you finally wrap your head around it. Who says puzzles can't be heartfelt? Merry Christmas! Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.