This book contains a bunch of smug anagrams: Hidden Christmas lyrics, Christmas books, acknowledgements... It also contains AN INORDINATE AMOUNT OF METAPHORS!!!! BAD. METAPHORS! I cannot stress that enough, this book is fuuuuuull of baaaaaad writing that the author thinks is clever. You know what this book does NOT contain? A BELIEVABLE MURDER MYSTERY!!! Clearly, this person read a whole bunch of Christmas murder mysteries, and said, "Ooo, hold my eggnog, bet I could write one of those!"... She could not.

Let me dive in; spoilers ahead:

Bad Metaphors -
A metaphor is meant to evoke something in the reader, a sense or feeling that a straight-forward description of what's physically happening might not be able to finesse. The metaphor should match the tone of the writing, a sinister metaphor for a spooky scene, a delicate metaphor for a nostalgic scene, etc etc.
This author doesn't care about honoring tone or themes. Many of the metaphors are hokey Christmas ones, shoe-horning in phrases like, "As if stabbed by a sprig of holly." Many are silly personifications, lending a cartoonishness to the scene that wasn't intended. Many are extended and overexplained, whole paragraphs dedicated to painting a run-on metaphor, instead of enhancing the scene with a single, poignant phrase. Many misuse words or invent new phrases, forcing the reader to struggle through colloquialisms to find what the author MEANT to say. Almost all misuse sentence structure, which make the metaphors read incorrectly. I'll give you a made up example: "She was angry, buzzing with it, like the beads that rattle in a baby's toy." Ahem. The sentence structure suggests that the beads and the girl have something in common: They both buzz with anger. It does not suggest that the girl is rattled, and feels her anger as if she's being shaken. The correct structure ought to simply be: "Angry comebacks rattled around inside her." See? The word rattle does all the work, you already get the sense of someone being all shook up, without extra verbiage. If THIS author had chosen her VERBS more carefully, she wouldn't need to write clunky metaphors!!!

Bad Puzzles -
The author hid a bunch of anagrams for the audience, but they don't add anything to the reading experience. If anything, they detract from it. There is no reward, no twist reveal if you find all the anagrams. And, without a key, there is no way to find half of the anagrams, because anything can be an anagram if you scramble it around, we only have 26 letters in the English alphabet! I caught myself scanning for plausible anagrams instead of ACTUALLY reading the book, and then instantly gave up the author's game.
In the story, there are a bunch of anagrams hidden inside poems, meant for the cousins to solve. But most of the answers are special to Lily and Lilianna, so THE READER would never be able to figure them out without knowing the BACKSTORY of these two characters. There is no way for the reader to play along and solve the mystery. And therefore, it's a bore and a chore to skim over these passages, because you're not dissecting the clues, you're just waiting for Lily to tell you the answer.

Bad Messages -
I almost gave this book some credit, because it has positive LGBTQA representation, and I was really happy to see a diverse cast in this sub-genre. But I took those points right back, because there are so many other negative messages in this book XD.
1) Our "hero", Lily, is depressed and has suicidal thoughts. She is also accidentally pregnant. She refuses to listen to experts, and suppresses her baby with a corset, citing that, "If it was good enough in Victorian England, why shouldn't it be fine today!" She treats her baby like it's a chance at salvation: She'll be the mother she never got to have. YIKES! A baby can be a blessing, but it is also a major source of stress, AND an individual person with its own life to live. A baby cannot solve your problems if you are depressed or suicidal. A baby is not a therapist's tool, it does not exist for you to project your anxieties and "solutions" onto. And DEFINITELY don't take medical advice that's 100 years old!
2) There seems to be a running theme that you can't trust doctors/people of science, in this book. One man of science, a coroner, was bribed to overlook a murder. Another aspiring coroner IS himself an accessory to murder. A licensed psychologist is a mass murderer. Plus, the aforementioned dig at maternity doctors. I don't understand why this book, which is otherwise a love letter to academia, is snobby about science.
3) WHAT is up with Gray? Is he just supposed to be shy and awkward? Is he meant to be on the autistic spectrum? Was he more than verbally abused by his sister? I cannot get a beat on what his mannerisms are supposed to tell me about his person. And he says the CRAZIEST $#17, like that the dead are better listeners than the living O_O. He has serial killer, or serial killer's accomplice, written all over him. If he IS meant to be on the spectrum, I don't like the debunked stereotype that atypical people are dangerous and unfeeling. And if he's NOT on the spectrum, why are we never given a complete motivation for WHY he romanticizes death and aids serial killers?
4) The lesbian lawyer love interest who shows up at the beginning and end of the book. Listen, it's great that this book has a queer protagonist, and a queer "love" interest front and center. But a trope is a trope, cis or queer: Girlfriends are not trophies for having saved the day! They don't exist in a vacuum. Instead of literally boxing Isabelle the lady love into a hidden room until the finale, I wish the book had USED her throughout the story, so that we got to see hers and Lily's love rekindle and flourish.
5) The more family members that get killed off, the happier and freer our "hero" becomes. Listen, I get the theme, that family secrets and expectations can be a burden, and it's ok to shed them and be yourself. BUT you shouldn't underscore that theme by making your protagonist feel relieved after the mass murder of her entire family! XD

Bad Plot -
So here's where we get mega-spoilery. About halfway through the book, I realized we hadn't gotten the usual locked-room mystery rundown of backstories and motivations for all of the characters. Everyone was...there. Some... want a house. Some don't. And despite being related, and having the sympathy or mental faculties to attempt to get their way with persuasion, bribery, blackmail, etc., INSTEAD everyone resorts to murder. Immediately. No buildup or provocation. The bad guys murder for personal gain. The good guys murder to save the day. Murder is status quo with this fam XD. I know it's in the title of the book, but... I didn't feel like the crescendo was earned. Everyone started at I WILL MURDER FOR THIS, so.... It wasn't a shock when somebody made good on it.

By the end, I tried to retrace the plot to figure out if the motivations for WHY people murdered were clear... No. XD No, they were not. By my understanding, the initial problem was: Siblings Edward, Lilianna and Marianna are all part of a board or trust or something and co-own their childhood home. Everyone is living together and raising families in this one house, despite having cottages and other out-buildings on the property. No one is strapped for cash or space. Edward wants to turn more than a few rooms into a hotel with office space. Lilianna doesn't, though she has no plans to do anything else with the property, either. Edward THREATENS TO MURDER HIS OTHER SISTER, MARIANA, AND HIS NIECE, LILY, if Mariana doesn't out-vote Liliana for hotel/office. From the get-go, Edward is ready to solve creative differences WITH MURDER! There is no backstory for Edward as to why, no gambling debts, or condescension for his mother and sisters' artsy academic lack of ambitions... The answer for why he's suddenly greedy for more income, and a monopoly on the family finances, is....*shrug*.

Edward doesn't wait to see if Mariana was swayed by his threat. He just kills her XD. He comes up with a plot to make it look like she slit her wrists, and he is seen by multiple witnesses as he concocts fake blood to plant at the scene of the crime. Why not actually slit her wrists, and leave her in a bathtub? Who knows! BUT THEN, for no explained reason, he changes tactics at the last second, and attempts to hang Mariana. He fails, she flees, he strangles her outside in the cold. Then, to make it look like she failed to hang herself - and slit her own wrists as a secondary attempt on her own life - he cuts her arms. Only, she doesn't bleed, because it's cold outside. SO THEN he gets the fake blood to plant at the scene... Did you catch that Catch-22? He made fake blood to cover the fact that she wouldn't bleed in the cold BEFORE he knew that he would need fake blood to cover the fact that she wouldn't bleed in the cold...
He didn't need to murder her. He didn't need to murder her this way. And the author couldn't even keep straight what his evil scheme was.

Edward brags and confesses to Lilianna. Lilianna attempts to reopen the investigation, but the police deny her claim. Lilianna tells her suspicions to her girlfriend and.... a girl her daughter's age who grows up to become the family lawyer?... Weird choice, Aunt L. Why not tell Lily, whose mother was just murdered?
It is unclear in which order things happened next. Lily is adopted by Aunt Lilianna, and taken away from the house. The house IS renovated for hotel and office space. Lilianna kills Edward in a car "accident", as revenge. The hotel/office closes. Did Lilianna stay in the house after Edward confessed - trying to prove his guilt, while he reshaped their home and reaped the benefits - and then fled the scene of HER crime? Or, did Lilianna flee (fearing Edward), kill him, inherit the home and business, and then... shut it down? Benefit from it for a few years, then shut it down? (Also, at some point during this dosey-do, Mariana built a secret music room in the game room to avoid the hotel/office workers.... even though she's...dead....)
Lilianna couldn't get justice, so she got revenge... and then sank the family's prospects! XD She didn't move back into the house, she didn't re-renovate the hotel/office into something of her choosing, she didn't sink income into restoring the house for her children (or her favorite niece). The murder was cathartic for her, so, I guess that's something. But why doesn't she spare a thought for Edward's children (Rachel, Ronnie and Tom), her poor orphaned niece and nephews? Why doesn't she pity them as much as she pities Lily? Doesn't she realize that she's become the monster she sought to destroy?

TWENTY YEARS LATER Lilianna becomes paranoid that someone else in the family is going to get revenge on her for what she did to Edward. She decides, "Hey, the house is mine, I COULD give it to Lily, restore what ought to have been her inheritance, make right Edward's wrongs; it's high time Lily knew the truth about what happened to her mother, and who might be a threat to her next... OR, I could create a Hunger Games gauntlet, where the cousins scramble against each other to claim the inheritance, and I just hope and pray that Lily fights her way to the finish!" The entire premise for the "game" is ridiculous! Why did she wait 20 years to bring Lily into her confidence? Why did the mysterious revenge-seeker take 20 years to make a move against Aunt L? Why did Aunt L suddenly become suspicious that her life was in danger? Why did she leave her confession and the fate of the estate up to chance, instead of marshalling allies and evidence FAST to protect her and her loved ones from harm? Nothing about the premise for the ENTIRE BOOK makes ANY sense! If anything, Lilianna machinated a scenario where the cousins were MORE likely to murder for opportunity.

Spoiler alert, Tom, Edward's son, does exactly that: Goes on a murder spree to gain the inheritance. Like his father before him, he has no motives either. Revenge against Lilianna is one thing. But murdering his own brother in order to get an old house in need of repair? There is no family fortune or business. Tom isn't shown to be someone in debt, or with big dreams. What is the POINT?! And, to achieve his goal, he enters an incestuous alliance with his cousin Sara, and their canoodling on the premises almost gets them caught multiple times! WHY THIS?!?! Why the incest subplot? And why are the villains not smart enough to keep their paws off each other for a few days? Tom did not need to seduce Sara, Sara already had a grudge against her mom/Aunt Lilianna. So WHY does he?!?! And Sara and Tom seemingly kill off their siblings just because they would have helped Lily. But Lily didn't want the property! If Tom and Sara had done NOTHING, and Lily had won the game, Lily would have handed the win over to SOMEONE ELSE gladly! Tom could have sweet-talked his brother into sharing the bounty, an easy mark. In fact, as the previous generation proved, this property is big enough for multiple households; the cousins could have easily split the bounty, but instead the people with the fewest dependents and weakest ambitions fought to have a total monopoly. WHYYYYY?!?!?! Murder and incest were SO unnecessary to getting what they want.... But what is it they want?!?! Money? Property? Bragging rights? To burn it to the ground as a comeuppance against their treacherous elders? It's never spelled out! Why do Tom and Sara do anything they do?

At no point does anyone call off the game on account of MURDER. And even though they know a serial killer is slinking around the property, nobody investigates the hotel rooms, or the cottages and other out-buildings, for potential clues/hiding spots. Isabelle the lawyer, the one with all of the confiscated cellphones, is informed of what's happening but does not call for help. Occasionally, she pops out of hiding (with superhuman speed and with real-time knowledge she shouldn't have while locked in her secret bunker) to protect Lily, but no one else. BUT, the minute the gauntlet is over and Lily has definitely won the deed, Isabelle THEN calls the police. Except, you know, everyone's dead by then. XD So, Lily and Isabelle stroll the grounds, happy and excited about their future prospects at Murder House. Umm, excuse me dears, this is a MAJOR crime scene! You're all suspects, and going straight to jail. Do not pass go, do not collect $200 dollars. XD

Everyone is greedy, selfish, stupid, and senseless.


BAAAAAAD WRITING from cover to cover! If you're in the mood for a hate read to tackle ironically, be my guest. Otherwise, do NOT let this pretty cover fool you. I wish I could get my time back. ;__;