So we’re taking the decorations down and putting the tree back in it’s box. Another Christmas done and dusted and a return back to normality and routine with batteries recharged after a relaxing break with family and friends. Unless of course you are Detective Inspector James Walker, who must be absolutely exhausted heading into 2024!!
‘The Night Before Christmas’ is the fourth book in a series written by Alex Pine about D.I.James who has relocated from London up to Cumbria. If he was hoping for a quiet life then he can think again as he finds himself having to solve another murder over Christmas. His fourth shift of working all through the festivities! I wonder if he misses the old days, just a tiny bit?
On this shift, four hunters go missing in the fells of Cumbria on Christmas Eve. When a dead body is discovered with evidence that they have been murdered it becomes a race to find the other hunters and to find out who’s causing all these shenanigans on Christmas Eve!
At Book Club we did enjoy this book and found it whizzed by when you were reading it (which worked well if like some of our members you were having a hectic Christmas - although never as hectic as DI Walker’s obviously!).
Some of us would have liked to have found out more about the lives of Walker’s team, but then there were other members who preferred that it concentrated on the job in hand and just cracked on with solving the case. We all had sympathy for James’s wife Annie and thought she showed great patience as she handled her husband working again over Christmas!
We enjoyed all the red herrings which popped up along the way to take us off the trail and we all thought it was a good twist at the end and none of us saw it coming! A couple were heading in the right direction, but nobody guessed it spot on! So that was great!
This book is perfect for fans of James Patterson as it’s a similar style and we gave it a solid 3 star in our vote.
So we’d all better rest up for a few months as a nice loose end in the final part of the book suggests that we could be in for another hectic instalment of Christmas with the Walkers in 2024. Fingers crossed!