Farm Fresh Blog

Make the Most of Murder reviews: Miss Winter in the Library with a Knife, by Martin Edwards.

Find the clues. Solve the puzzles. Can you survive and win the game?

You are cordially invited to an all-expenses-paid Christmas holiday at Midwinter, a remote hamlet in the North Pennines in England to play a murder mystery game. Joining you are a has-been mystery author infamous for copycatting the classics, an out-of-work publicist, a disgraced influencer whose off-the-record remarks have come back to bite her, a true crime podcaster who’s gone offline, a former hotshot literary agent who’s accused of sexual harassment, and a publisher who used AI to plagiarize bestsellers - and was dropped by Netflix. . .

. . . then one by one, people begin actually dying . . .

. . . Snowed in with no way to leave, the game suddenly turns very real. The players realized they must figure out what happened five years ago, when another guest died at Midwinter under mysterious circumstances, if they are to have any hope of making it to the new year.

It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of murder. Death adds a bit of spice to life. And to a book. I plucked this one off the shelf at Barnes & Noble because I do love a good mystery. When I read the back cover, I immediately thought of the movie, Clue, or the Knives Out franchise. A modern Agatha Christie.

And this book has those things that I love - sort of. I love a mystery, but the thing that keeps me turning the pages is not the mystery itself, it’s the characters on the page. I wanted to love this book. I really did. The author, Martin Edwards, has a flawless resume of mystery books. Impeccable. He has won countless awards for writing mysteries and crime fiction, and this book reflects that. And if I have to be honest with myself, many of the mystery books and movies that I like do have flat characters, because the focus is on the mystery, not the characters. Except for the main protagonist, characters in these books come and go and are simply playing a bit role to drive the mystery forward. I just tend to like character-driven books more.

This book is written in many layers. And perhaps that was part of my problem. There were so many layers that I was getting bogged down in details, puzzles, website pages, podcast manuscripts, maps, rules of the game and journal entries. This was a mystery inside a mystery, surrounded by a bigger mystery, and it was hard for me to keep track of the story. This book is not an easy read, but it is well-crafted. I didn’t find myself on a rollercoaster ride to the finish line, but the ending was satisfactory. There were a couple of points where the crime scene investigator inside me shrugged and said, “Okaaay, if that’s the direction you want to go, then we’ll go with that, but we could explore there more.”

Overall, I found it to be a well-crafted, multilayered mystery. If you are looking for a lighter read with well-developed characters that you want to visit with in sequel, this isn’t your story. But if you love solving puzzles, anagrams, and riddles yourself while reading a murder mystery, this may well be the book for you.