Murder at the Christmas Emporium, a deliciously vicious variation on the classic “locked room” mystery, delivers a trove of holiday gifts, just not the kind one normally would expect.
“…[F]or almost a hundred years, if you were a child living in the great metropolis of London, the Christmas season never truly began until your first visit to the Verity’s Emporium Grand Festive Display. Such a sight it was, in the days before wonders became cheap and arrived through the post in grey plastic packaging.” Here, all the toys are unique: handmade, carefully designed, intricately painted.
The store seems to encompass all those 100 years, too: from a distinctly Victorian vibe to a modern sophistication, with a dash of Steampunk. The Emporium is sequestered in a distant corner of The City on a “narrow, cobbled alleyway,” called Quockerwodger Court, (the very name, meaning a “wooden toy that jerks its limbs when pulled”).
A group of specially invited Londoners gather at the legendary Emporium for an evening of afterhours VIP shopping, and yes, it happens that each of them harbors a secret, because in contemporary crime fiction, secrets, especially those buried but dying to emerge, are the prime engines driving plots … at least it feels like that.
The varied cast includes Fran, a TV chef with a past, Dean, a “business fixer”, Merry, who writes insipid platitudes for a greeting card company, Benjamin, an antique dealer, Evangeline, owner of a “high-end festive decoration” business and a secretive, strange woman named Josie, whose past remains under wraps for a much of the story. A disparate group on the surface, but beneath that superficial sheen, they are in one sense or another, inter-related. We wouldn’t have it any other way!
Yet perhaps the most significant character in all this is Peggy Goodchild, the piano playing automaton — the Emporium’s most famed attraction. “Clockwork Peg,” as she’s affectionally known, serenades the shoppers with her “jerky and strange movements.” As the Emporium’s owner says, “She’s very much real, she just isn’t alive. She is an automaton built by my grandfather. She has been playing this piano for almost a hundred years and if we keep her wound-up, she will play it for a hundred more.” Peggy’s backstory plays a key role in the story.
An air of enchantment hangs over the early chapters, although a hint of foreboding is always lurking. The guests are given a “special” hot chocolate before entering the interior of a store that is crammed with many other lesser automatons, always a magical experience for the uninitiated.
Murder at the Christmas Emporium takes a deceptively meandering path to the action. Andreina Cordani, whose first book was The Twelve Days of Murder, (and at this rate, maybe cornering the murderous mayhem holiday subgenre!) clearly relishes detailing the backstories of both automatonic Peggy Goodchild and her flesh and blood creations. Care is taken to slowly but steadily unravel the tangled connections, the love (and hate), and the power machinations of her increasingly embattled, terrified “shoppers.” Combined with a plethora of visual, twisted Christmas lore, hidden passages, and a sense of misdirection around every curve, all skillfully employed by Cordani, those pages turn themselves.
After becoming rather stoned from the special hot chocolate, let into the structure (they had been asked (forced) to surrender their phones upon entry) and commencing with shopping, the small elite group come to a slightly disturbing realization: they are locked in. At the stroke of midnight, the lights and power go out.
And the killing begins. To attempt to summarize the rest of the story feels like a fool’s errand. If the convoluted plot, lurching back and forth from past to present, with the requisite (and perfect) twists seems daunting at first, hang on, because when things get dicey (hint) the story lunges like a hungry cougar eager for a kill.
While Cordani wades deeply into this variation of the locked-room crime novel, she mixes in the notion of an “escape room” adventure as well. There are moments in the story when the reader wishes for a traditional “evidence board” with all the names – victims, relatives, motives – the accumulated case data in one place – because we have many players here, all of whom have some axe to grind, some shame of past behavior, some murderous disdain for a fellow “shopper.” But Cordani wraps up this holiday death fest with utter aplomb, leading us to wonder how she’ll top this doozy with her next novel. The final twist is icily elegant.
Peter Handel has been writing about crime fiction since the early 1990s. His reviews, interviews, and profiles have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Portland Oregonian, Pages Magazine, Mystery Reader’s Journal, The Rap Sheet and CrimeReads. Join his Substack here.
