An Unfortunate Christmas Murder by Hannah Hendy
I received a copy from Canelo through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
As Margery is prepping for her first holiday season as the school’s newest kitchen manager, she quickly finds that things are getting out of hand. Fast. Between being forced into the Christmas concert, Mrs. Large’s mysterious death at the hand of fallen stage lights, and someone sabotaging her kitchen’s baked goods, Margery doesn’t know what to do. Is there really a murder mystery on her hands, and is it connected to her kitchen woes? The more Margery investigates, the more questions she has on her hands.
I picked up this book expecting a holiday cozy mystery, and that’s exactly what I got. We follow Margery as she spends her first year as kitchen manager. Luckily for her, she works with her wife, so she always knows she has at least one person she can trust. While the book is cute and funny at first, the cute wears off fairly quickly and the funny quickly falls on Rose to keep up.
We have a large cast of characters, and I do like some of them, but I found that the majority of the characters are one dimensional. I also found that Margery and her wife, Clementine, didn’t seem like a married couple. In fact, they didn’t seem like a couple at all. They read as sisters who occasionally bicker rather than a couple that occasionally bickers. I don’t know if they read as a couple in the first book, which I have not read, but I can confirm that it’d be more believable if they were sisters. Personally, my favorite character is Rose, and she’s one of the few characters that really stuck out.
The main mystery seemed like it could’ve been a wild and off the wall one, but it fell flat and didn’t make a lot of sense. Without giving spoilers, every time I think about the who and the way, all I can think about is that the motives make absolutely no sense. Maybe one or the other, but both? That’s just confusing. There’s also another small mystery about Ben, the new cook who can’t cook a thing, and I’m left wondering what the point of that was. It was very small and didn’t add anything to the story, especially since he wasn’t a red herring to the investigation. I’m baffled by that part of the story and I think it would've worked if he was either a major suspect or otherwise very important to the main plot.
While the story does have its problems, I do think that there is a lot of potential for the series. Margery and Clementine’s relationship needs to be developed so that they’re believable as a married couple. The core cast of characters are very likable, so I’d love to see them have some good character development, or at least some depth added. The main mystery fell flat, so I think it really just needed some tweaking so it would be better developed along with better motives for the characters, and that’s something that will likely get better as the series continues. All in all, this didn’t work out to be a great read for me, but I do see the potential and look forward to seeing how the series develops. I think there’s a good possibility that this is just a shaky start to a great series.
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