Review by Booklist Review
Merry swipes her boss's invitation to the exclusive Christmas Eve--shopping experience at London's Verity's Emporium, known for its handmade toys. She's looking for the perfect Christmas gift for the man she hopes to turn from friend to boyfriend. The store is as magical as expected, with the VIP tour being led by the flamboyant Monty Verity himself. Delight turns to horror as Merry realizes she and several others have been drugged and locked in the store at the end of the evening. After the group finds a dead body, they redouble their efforts to leave, but other deaths follow, causing them to become suspicious of one another even as they try to work together to find out how they are connected and to escape before they all perish. Each is hiding a dark secret they must share before they can unravel the mystery. Told from multiple points of view, both past and present, this compelling, stand-alone mystery with its myriad plot twists, well-drawn characters, and a lovingly described Christmastime setting will appeal to locked-room-mystery fans.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Holiday magic goes horribly wrong in Cordani's delightfully eccentric follow-up to The Twelve Days of Murder. Merry Clarke steals her boss's invitation to the reopening of Verity's Emporium, a bespoke London toy store that's home to elaborate displays and strange mechanical attractions. After Montagu Verity, the store's Willy Wonka--esque proprietor, offers a warm welcome to Merry and a handful of other VIPs, the shoppers discover they've been drugged by their complimentary hot cocoa. They awake trapped in the multilevel, secret passage-filled building, their phones having been confiscated upon entry, and soon discover the dead body of the store's head toymaker. From there, flashbacks tease out each character's backstory and relationships to the Veritys, while tense conversations in the present slowly reveal their links to one another. Meanwhile, the store brims with clues and terrors, including a display depicting each guest's brutal murder. Cordani's plotting is devious and perfectly calibrated, revealing just enough to heighten dramatic irony while leaving plenty of room for shocking twists. This canny combination of whodunit and horror makes for a gleefully demented stocking stuffer. (Nov.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A VIP shopping trip goes hellishly awry. Seven lucky shoppers have been hand-chosen by owner Montagu Verity to attend an exclusive Christmas Eve event at Verity's Emporium, a storied London shop known throughout the U.K. for its extravagant holiday displays. At first blush, the store seems a fairyland fulfilling all their childhood Christmas fantasies: crisp gingerbread, decadent hot chocolate, exquisite handmade toys, even indoor sledding. But a strange sleepiness falls over the group, and they awaken to a nightmare. They're locked in the store, they've surrendered their phones at the door, and it becomes obvious that someone intends to kill them one by one. Cordani toggles back and forth between glimpses of the prospective victims' earlier lives--as children, at university, and early in their careers--and their current plight. The problem is that at no time do any of her retrospective thumbnail sketches give readers much reason to wish for the grown-up characters' survival. Even Merry, stuck in a dead-end job and hopelessly in love with co-worker Ross, is foolishly controlling, and TV celebrity Fran, tortured by a secret Cordani teases for more 100 pages before revealing as the most obvious thing possible, is shallow and self-serving. When bad things happen to good people, justice cries out for an explanation. But when bad things happen to bad people, well…why the hell not? A joyless Yuletide tale offers little to celebrate. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
