Murder at the Christmas Emporium

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.)