The Twelve Days of Murder

September 11, 2023
YA novelist Cordani (The Girl Who...) makes an impressive adult debut with this devious holiday whodunit. Twelve years ago, a group of university friends formed a murder mystery cosplaying group called the Masquerade Society. During their final game, the group’s ringleader, Karl, went missing, and another member’s expensive necklace vanished. In the present, each of the society’s former members—Charley, Leo, Sam, Gideon, Pan, and Shona—have been summoned by a mysterious invitation to a hunting lodge in the Scottish Highlands for a Christmas reunion game. What begins as lighthearted fun turns grave when Pan, who’d been assigned the role of “Lady Partridge,” is found dead and dangling from a pear tree. As the body count starts to rise, the group is forced to reopen questions about what happened to Karl all those years ago, and determine who among them poses a threat to the others. Cordani starts in the key of a holiday cozy but gets dark fast, a risky transition she pulls off without a hitch. Mystery lovers of all stripes will walk away satisfied. Agent: Ruth Logan, Bonnier Books.

October 15, 2023
University student Charley Sale joins the Murder Masquerade Society, a group of friends who stage murder-mystery events. At one of the masquerades, Karl disappears from a locked room, never to be heard from again. Twelve years later, Karl's sister Ali persuades Charley to attend a murder mystery at a remote manor house in Scotland during Christmas. Working-class Charley longs to be fully accepted in this aristocratic, moneyed group, and, needing the money Ali promises her, agrees, even though at the last event, someone tried to drown her. The group is quickly snowed in, and it turns out all are hiding secrets that someone seems determined to expose. Then the murders begin for real, with guests being picked off one by one and help unavailable due to the snow and lack of cell service. Told from multiple points of view, this compelling, complex, page-turning locked-room mystery is set in both the past and the present and is chock-full of plot twists.

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October 1, 2023
A murder-mystery weekend turns actually deadly for a group of British friends. Twelve years after the disappearance of their friend Karl during one of their events, the surviving members of the Murder Masquerade Society have met up at Fenshawe Manor in the Scottish Highlands on Christmas Eve to act out a Twelve Days of Christmas-themed play: "Young people of their class didn't do cosplay, it would never have occurred to them to trudge around sci-fi conventions dressed like Storm Troopers, but this was their equivalent--with a glamorous booze-filled evening of backstabbing fun thrown in." Although wealthy, privileged, and on vacation, no one at the party is quite who they seem to be. And when the group is snowed in, the first real victim appears and the body count begins, just like the countdown in the famous Christmas song. No one has reception to call the police, so the friends tough it out in the house without knowing who among them is the killer. Years ago, Charley, the least privileged member of the group, was blamed when a valuable necklace went missing--and she's determined to avoid taking the fall for the murders. After a long exposition introducing the game and large cast of characters, the pace quickens as the frenemies grow increasingly suspicious of one another. The author of the play has barely disguised the actors' real-life secrets as funny fictional backstories for their characters, such as this for Charley's: "She has stolen a priceless necklace from Mrs Dove..." Meanwhile, the snowy Scottish backdrop turns smelly and bloody from all the dead bodies. The deaths are gruesome and fit the theme. Scandals, hurt feelings, and secret ambitions are the suspected motives, but by the time one character rises to the top as a suspect, they're killed off. Formulaic without being too predictable, it's good for spreading holiday fear.

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