Description
In the hectic days before Christmas, when everyone’s thoughts are on Christmas shopping, packing parcels, decorating the tree and stuffing the turkey, a mad murderer is at large. A series of random killings, by bizarre and always fortuitous means, transfixes London and presents the police with a seemingly insoluble problem. How in the vastness of the metropolis is one crazed but outwardly normal person to be pinpointed and caught?
The reader has one advantage over Detective-Superintendent Knowles: a knowledge of the murderer’s thoughts. But Marian Babson is far too cunning a crime writer to allow these to give anything away, beyond the fact that the murderer lives in a rooming-house, whose occupants are already known.
Which of them is the killer? It could be any one of them. Only when all these lonely men and women are gathered together for a Christmas dinner and the murderer’s thoughts turn lovingly to the carving knife does the reader, together with Superintendent Knowles who is also present, realize that the last of the twelve deaths of Christmas is about to take place before his very eyes.
Marian Babson’s crime novels are always original, well crafted, shrewdly observed and suspenseful. This one is a winner on all counts.
