Title: Murder On The Christmas Express
Author: Alexandra Benedict
Year: 2023
Genre: Murder-Mystery, Crime, Cozy Crime
As this post is going live on Boxing Day, I hope that you all had a lovely Christmas and a Happy New Year for 2025 and may it bring you and your loved ones health, wealth, peace and happiness.
Murder On The Christmas Express by Alexandra Benedict is an update on the classic locked-door murder mystery novels. The book was selected for my book club read although I was attracted to the title and that it sounded like an old-fashioned murder-mystery novel and an improvement on the previous read, Death and Croissants.
Our story starts when the sleeper train travelling from London to Fort William derails on Christmas Eve. One of the passengers on the train, Meg is a social media influencer and is filming a live stream, threatening to tell the world about her boyfriend Grant’s behaviour when she winds up dead.
The action then moves to earlier in the night when the passengers are waiting for the train, along with recently retired Met detective Roz Parker, who is moving back to Scotland to be with her daughter who is in labour with her grandchild. We learn about the events leading up to Meg’s death and as the emergency services plot a way to the train, Roz is forced to come out of retirement for one last case.
As the countdown begins, Roz discovers many sectets on board the train, and one of them may have been a motive for murder. As the body count rises, will Roz get to the truth?
The novel is described as a page-turning homage to the Golden Age of crime fiction on the blurb, with some nods to Agatha Christie – no doubt incited by the title which more than subtly plays on Murder on the Orient Express.
Whilst I haven’t actually read any Agatha Christie books (she’s a classic author who has unfortunately passed me by) but if this is seen as a modern retelling I very much enjoyed it.
Roz is a fascinating lead character who has used her job to block out a horrific memory from her past and is questioning her place in the world now she is retired. However the murder that happens on the train forces her to confront the darkness within her past. We can see through the book she is a capable and brilliant detective and also empathise with her struggle to come to terms with her past and her need to get to her daughter who is in labour early with her grandchild.
Of course, for a murder-mystery novel like this it is also important to have a good range of suspects and the eighteen passengers on the train are a diverse range of people and during the course of the book you find yourself suspecting and resuspecting everyone. From the boyfriend, to a group of students attending a quiz, to a family of four and more – all of them have secrets which are slowly unravelled during the book.
I was gripped by the mystery of the novel and found myself reading it in very large chunks as I wanted to find out who did it and as the bodies pile up you constantly find yourself having to guess and then guess again, with plenty of red herrings. The actual resolution of the mystery was also satisfying and very clever that I didn’t work it out by the end of the book.
However my only critique is the ending does come a little bit early so the final few chapters seem to meander slightly as the book doesn’t really know what it should be doing when maybe the final chapters could have been a bit sharper. Also often with these books once you have read the solution it can be quite difficult to motivate yourself to re-read it again.
The book also has some very fun quizzes and challenges included – from hidden codes within the pages, to a trivia quiz which will definitely keep some readers entertained. I personally didn’t do these as I got very involved in the plot but it is a nice touch.
I would recommend this book as a cozy crime story to read on dark winter nights.
