If murder mysteries are your passion, you’ll love these classic murder mystery books that’ll tide you over the festive season to your next murder mystery evening. If you enjoy your murder mystery novels with an amateur sleuth finding the truth about dead bodies, surviving peril in a large country house and a cast of eccentric, secretive characters, these books will be perfect for you! Get into the festive spirit with our favourite murder mystery classics.

Hercule Poirot’s Christmas – Agatha Christie
There are few detectives as beloved as Hercule Poirot, and in this novel, he solves the murder of the tyrannical Simeon Lee. Christmas Eve sees the Lee Family Reunion disrupted by the almighty crash of furniture and a wailing, high pitched scream. Simeon Lee is found upstairs with his throat slashed and in a pool of his own blood.

Poirot is staying in the village for Christmas with a friend when he hears about the murder and offers to help solve the mystery, but rather than finding a mourning family, there’s an air of suspicion, suggesting everyone had a reason to hate, and a motive to murder, Simeon Lee.

Mystery in White – J Jefferson Farjeon
Heavy snowfall causes a train to halt near the village of Hemmersby, where several of the cold and tired passengers decide to take shelter in an empty country house. Only, this country house still has a fire lit and the table set for tea. The passengers are trapped together for Christmas so decide to uncover all the secrets of this empty house when a murderer suddenly strikes. This Christmas mystery will send shivers down your spine!

Murder for Christmas – Francis Duncan
A Benedict Grame has invited amateur sleuth, Mordecai Tremaine to spend Christmas at his country retreat in the sleepy village of Sherbroome. Tremaine arrives on Christmas Eve to find everyone’s enjoying the party, but as the clock strikes midnight, a dead body looking uncannily like Father Christmas is found under the tree, along with the presents.

With a relatively small number of characters and suspects, you’ll really enjoy figuring our whodunnit, whilst you warm to the unassuming and quirky amateur sleuth in this classic and wonderfully written country house murder mystery.

A Christmas Party – Georgette Heyer
Heyer’s A Christmas Party is the perfect Christmas country house locked room mystery, complete with an elderly Scrooge character! Christmas at Lexham Manor is ruined when six guests find themselves as the prime suspects of murdering the elderly miser who owns the estate.

The motive of this Christmas murder is clearly inheritance, but the real mystery is how anyone could’ve entered the locked room and stabbed the victim in the back.

Crime at Christmas – CHB Kitchin
Stock-broker and amateur sleuth Malcolm Warren resolves to solve two violent murders that occur at Beresford Lodge in Hampstead. Could the murderer really be one of the relatives or close friends at this glamorous Christmas party?

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