Kate and Tony Hetheridge are taking very tentative steps to recover from their near-death experience in their last police investigation. Kate, a police officer for the Metropolitan Police, has been on extended leave, and she’s still suffering signs of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from their last case. Tony, her former boss at the Met and now a private detective, desperately wants back into the world of investigations in London. They’ve been living with Kate’s brother, sister, and adopted son at the Hethridge estate in Devon.
Paul Bhar, their colleague at the Met, can barely wait for their return. His division is seriously understaffed, and he needs all the help he can get. Like with this brand-new case – a reclusive, aging billionaire has been literally scared to death in bed with a contraption that resembles something out of a B-grade horror movie. And suspects abound, from a 12-year-old boy to the neighbors in the billionaire’s posh neighborhood.
Blue Christmas by Emma Jameson, the sixth in the Lord & Lady Hetheridge mystery series by Emma Jameson, has somewhat of a (planned) connection to A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. Except someone has murdered Uncle Scrooge. And there’s even a Bob Cratchit-type character.
Emma Jameson
In addition to the Hetheridge series, Jameson has a second series of novels featuring the amateur detective Dr. Benjamin Bones. The series begins in Cornwall during World War II, and it has a companion series called “The Magic of Cornwall.” Jameson is currently working on the third Dr. Bones mystery, and she says there will be more Lord and Lady Hetheridge novels.
Blue Christmas is several stories wrapped neatly together into one narrative. There’s the police investigation of the murder. There’s the story of Kate’s recovery and hoped-for return to full-time police work. And there’s a mystery around Paul Bhar, and why he won’t let his mother know his new address (and the character of the mother is rather Dickensian, too). It’s a story full of possibilities, and Jameson delivers.
Related:
My review of Ice Blue by Emma Jameson.
My review of Blue Murder by Emma Jameson.
My review of Something Blue by Emma Jameson.
My review of Black & Blue by Emma Jameson.
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