Murder on the Christmas Express
by Alexandra Benedict

What’s it about?

Eighteen passengers. Seven stops. One killer.

In the early hours of Christmas Eve, the sleeper train to the Highlands is derailed, along with the festive plans of its travellers. With the train stuck in snow in the middle of nowhere, a killer stalks its carriages, picking off passengers one by one. Those who sleep on the sleeper train may never wake again.

Can former Met detective Roz Parker find the killer before they kill again?

All aboard for . . . Murder on the Christmas Express

What I think:

This was giving Murder on the Orient Express as vibes but lacked the sparkle for me.

All of the trains to Scotland are cancelled except one which manages to brave the snow – seems unlikely to begin with.

On the train are a recently retired police detective, Roz Parker, on her way to Scotland for the birth of her grandchild. There’s also a couple of reality TV stars, a university quiz team, a family with a baby and an old woman with a cat.

As they are all on the sleeper train they start talking, organising quizzes and getting drunk together.

It is about half way through the book before anything happens. The train derails, one of the passengers is dead and Roz starts to investigate.

There’s a lot of walking around the train. It’s amazing how many times you can lose track of people on train carriages that are not moving. At one point people get off for a snowball fight which doesn’t seem to me to be very sensible.

Roz manages to investigate and work it all out. And while there’s no spoilers from me it’s all a bit improbable and unnecessarily complicated. The Christie style connections between the characters didn’t really work for me.

A lot of the book focuses on Roz’s backstory: her traumatic birth, experiences of assault and problematic relationships with both her mother and daughter. None of which I really cared about and most of it added little to the plot.

Despite the slow build up and all the focus on getting to know the characters I didn’t like any of them, didn’t care who died or who did it really.

This really appealed but did not meet my expectations.