Published By: Faber
Pages: 160
Released On: 24/09/2026
Welcome to Christmas at Grey Gables, where everyone’s a suspect 🎄
Struggling mystery writer Nicholas Child is commissioned to help another writer finish the overdue follow up to his breakout bestseller.
Travelling to Grey Gables, the writer’s Cape Cod home, in the week before Christmas, he discovers a house full of secrets, and a cast of very suspicious guests.
When two shocking deaths occur, Nicholas tries to write his account of what happened, and a perfectly fiendish puzzle starts to emerge.
*****
Thanks to NetGalley and Faber for the advanced copy of this title in return for an honest review.
I couldn’t help but sing along – do you see what I see – even if the cheerful song was at odds with the plot.
I’ve only read one of Peter’s books before, and that was another Christmas wintery short novella.
It’s short but instead of chapter, it’s split into three sections. I generally would have hated this as I love short, snappy chapters, but it flowed so well that to have multiple breaks in it, no matter how natural, would have interrupted that.
There is an element of Agatha Christie about it, almost like a murder mystery play kind of thing. It’s formulaic but expertly done. You can see it unfolding as if you were watching a Poirot re-run.
It’s written as if a character is talking directly to the reader which was a clever way of telling it. There’s also another very interesting formatting choice, which I won’t spoil here because I think it’s better to read as a surprise, and it definitely was that, and again it gave it an interesting edge, separating it from the influx of festive thriller.
I prefer my thrillers to be a bit longer so the author has more time to really develop the characters so I would have liked it to be longer. However, if you’ve got a small amount of time to read a book, then it is a good one to choose, as I read it in a couple of hours.
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