When A. Carver published The Christmas Miracle Crimes (2023) close to Christmas 2023, I was caught off-guard: with that title, one feels it should be read in the Winter, and I try to be about four to five weeks ahead on my blogging and so it had to wait until 2024. Then I just…didn’t read it in 2024, so Winter 2025 finally comes to the rescue

Carver’s debut, The Author is Dead (2022), displayed the sort of youthful enthusiasm the impossible crime is going to need if it hopes to continue to innovate and not fall into the sort of self-parodying state where almost every locked room is achieved by the murderer breaking the door in and dropping the key in the room to give the impression it was there the whole time. And The Christmas Miracle Crimes picks up the baton well from that joyous fan letter to the genre, once again throwing Alex Corby and her great aunt Cornelia Crow into a dense, busy, and innovative series of impossible happenings.

Stranded on a snowbound train on Christmas Eve — ha, classic — Alex and Cornelia are rescued by Robin Whitefell, who drives them to the family pile, Whitefell Chimneys, where the Whitefells have been invited by eldest brother Forrest to spend Christmas for the first time in several years. As snow positively drowns the landscape, and with mobile signal naturally restricted so as to provide a more Golden Age-y experience for everyone, it’s not long before a violent murder, perpetrated by someone dressed in a Santa Claus outfit, shatters the festive cheer. Only two problems: how was the room in which the body is found locked, and how could Saint Nick get to and from the isolated study without leaving any marks in the snow?

Little do Alex and Cornelia know, their problems are only just beginning.

Over the next few days, a positive cavalcade of impossible situations will confront the Whitefells, and frankly they can consider themselves lucky that Alex and Cornelia are there to help pick through them. Or, well, most of them can, because clearly it’s one of the nine people staying at the house who is responsible for these acts, and since one of those nine is a six year-old girl, the odds are already shortening. So who could possibly be responsible? How can they disappear seemingly at will? How can they make a snowman walk through walls? And what is behind it all?

To Carver’s immense credit, events come thick and fast, and the questions pile up around our cast as things get simply more and more baffling. Not only are the impossible situations themselves interesting — no mere locked door with a key on the inside here, speaking to a clear love of shin honkaku — there’s also some great speculation that really does cover the gamut of possible explanations to underline just how very impossible so many of these circumstances seem. The speculations around that opening murder are impressively rigorous, and while this doesn’t really qualify as detection per se, it’s lovely to see someone evince this sort of tender care with and clear zeal for the Grandest Game in the World.

In a marked improvement from that debut, Carver has stirred a little more interest into the characters this time, from the young Estelle to the social media ‘personality’ Hype Marathon (yes, that’s his name — I mean, obviously it’s not, but that’s what he goes by in the world of the book) who sees everything in terms of visibility and branding (“Liked and subscribed.”). Additionally, the siblings Nicky and Rudy are well-captured as disaffected teens who think this whole being isolated in the boondocks is shit…and, them being around Alex’s age at last begins to narrow down her as a character a little more (by my reckoning, she’s anything from a precocious 14 year-old to a juvenile twenty-five).

Some of the writing is really good, too, with the rougher edges of Carver’s written expression beginning to give way to some powerful descriptions and a few lovely moments that tell a lot in very few words:

To be simply nonplussed would be a luxury, but she couldn’t shake off something darker; a familiar sense of crawling dread.

A few aspects of technical description hold this up — I have no idea what the makeshift lock Alex constructs with tape and string to hold that window closed looks like, and that’s unfortunately rather important later on — but as a relentless journey into the blistering heart of impressively-stacked impossibilities it’s pretty hard to beat. It’s not the book to convince you of the joys of the impossible crime if they’re not your thing, but if you think you’ve seen it all then Carver’s impressively fertile imagination has some excellent surprises for you. I twigged to the guilty party by semi-guesswork simply because there was only really one person who could be involved in everything that went on…but even then I some doubts held me back, because, good heavens, they must have been running things incredibly close to the wire at times. And, yeah, that’s the solution — a matter of milliseconds at times, I’d suggest — but, wow, if you can’t get swept up in the fun of new impossible situations explained away with real pazzazz and verve then, well, look elsewhere.

Do I believe all the solutions? Not quite. Carver calls it “ingenuity by incompetence” in a late chapter title, where everything is explained, and I’m not sure anyone could get that lucky that many times in a row, but it’s huuuuge fun, and I’m not going to cavil too loudly about the improbabilities because, hey, this entire subgenre relies on improbabilities, and to see them so ingeniously deployed is a source of real joy. As someone who put out their first novel around the same time as Carver’s debut and has failed to follow it up so far, I’m honestly blown away by this author’s productivity — four books now exist in this series, with The Dry River Drownings (2024) and Hangings at Hempel’s Green (2025) having already followed this. And I want them to keep going, to keep up their love for this hardest of puzzle plots, so I’m 100% here to congratulate this achievement. Carver is living the dream.

So, then, as a festive mystery this might take some beating. Stringing together some superbly original situations, exploring them rigorously, and then tying the whole package up with a series of explanations that account for all the oddnesses is, honestly, the acme of puzzle plotting delight, and Carver has achieved all of that here. I eagerly anticipate those others two books mentioned above, and look forward to whatever else is cooking in that fabulous, youthful, enthusiastic brain. Keep up the excellent work!

Right, I better go work on the second draft of my next book. Expect it 2027 sometime. Maybe.