One haunted house. One impossible crime. One killer weekend. Thus runs the promise on the front cover of Murder Most Haunted (2025), the debut novel of Emma Mason, and that was enough to get in on my TBR as a modern example of the impossible crime that we’re no longer pretending I read just for TomCat‘s sake. So, did it deliver on those promises?

We start at the retirement party for DS Maggie ‘Midge’ McGowan: 55 years old, forced to walk with a cane as a result of being “morbidly” overweight, and possessed of a dodgy knee. The staff whip-round for a goodbye present raised just enough to send her off on a ghost-hunting weekend…

“Apparently, Haunting Holiday Excursions is run by an ex-copper who retired a few years ago. HR get a discount, so we’re all stuck with these for the foreseeable.”

…and so, while her wife Bridie stays behind to attend a chemotherapy session, Midge heads off to Atherton Hall with a small group of ghost hunters who all have their own reasons for being there. Of course, snow isolates them, and the fact that the house is in the middle of an army firing range means that it’s not safe to just up and leave, so it’s a problem when someone slashes both the throat of their tour guide and the tires of the bus — sorry, coach — they arrived in. Can Midge, who has spent her years cataloguing data for the police in the evidential property office, put her training to use and find the killer?

One of the hardest things to communicate about Murder Most Haunted is perhaps its most important facet: the tone in which it is written. We mostly see things in third-person from Midge’s perspective, and Midge’s perspective is, well, a little off-kilter. Pleasingly, Mason isn’t playing a game of labels, but there are elements of autism, of OCD, and of a general confoundment at the world that surrounds her which makes Midge interesting if not always easy company. She’s uncomfortable eating around people, and of being the object of anyone’s attention, and yet Mason finds a way to communicate this that is sort of breezy-with-rough-edges, if you’ll tolerate that description.

One excellent decision Mason has made, given Midge’s own difficulties with being around people, is to keep that small group of ghost-hunters very small. At times it almost tips over into convenience — ex-copper John Rendell is the owner of the firm, the trip leader, and the resident medium for the first-night séance, which seems like a lot of hats — but I love that Mason has done an almost Christianna Brand-level job of boiling this cast down to be as small as possible. As well as Rendell, we have the coach driver Harold, married couple Dr. Andrew and Gloria Mortimer, faded pop star Rona RX, and podcaster and paranormal investigator Noah Camber. That’s it, and it really focusses the mind when someone dies and suspicion starts to ricochet around. You’d really feel any excess characters in this situation, and instead it freed me up to spot the obviously guilty party…only for them to die violently a few chapters later. Marvellous!

Mason does good work in setting up the legend of the White Lady of Atherton Hall, and if the sightings of her in the house’s grounds don’t quite exploit the setup as they might, the book as a whole is so much fun and so lightly conveyed that it’s difficult to mind. Take the hemophobia joke, for one — low-hanging fruit, but difficult not to enjoy — or the following exchange during the séance:

Rona: ‘B. E . . .’ I think it’s spelling a name.

Gloria: ‘T. H.’

[The noise of the glass stops abruptly]

Harold: ‘Beth’!

Rendell: Does anyone here know a BETH?

Rona: My cousin. She’s called Beth.

[A small pause]

Gloria: She is, as in, she is still alive?

Rona: Yes. Lives in Barking.

Rendell: Well, obviously, it can’t be her.

Mason does a good job of keeping things focussed on the single setting, stirring in unease with a dead sheep or an inquisitive fox here and there. The odd bit of activity-based writing can get a little confusing at times — there’s a sequence where they enter the tunnels of the mines in the house’s grounds, and I had no idea where anyone was relative to anyone else…which does sort of matter later — but, as I’ve said, the impressive thing is how well the possibilities of such a small cast are developed, and how each new iteration of events feels like it’s really contributing to the overall story progression.

The locked room murder which drew me in, then, isn’t anything to get excited about — we’ve seen this solution bandied about for at least 120 years, I’d say — but the way the various threads tie in to the solution of who- and whydunnit is really rather fabulous. There is, I cannot deny, a real emotional heft to the closing pages, when the design behind it all becomes clear, and it made it very clear to me just how invested I’d become in this cast: watching them initially shrink from each other, only to bicker, irritate, and eventually come to respect, or at least better understand, the various individuals who make up this (dammit…!) rag-tag bunch of victims and investigators. It’s been quite some time since I was this invested in a cast overall, and that’s no mean feat.

A bit of searching tells me that a second novel featuring Midge is on the way — Murder on the Haunted Express (2026) due next October, and apparently containing another locked room problem — and I easily enjoyed this enough to commit to reading that upon release. There’s much here to credit Mason for, but I would particularly love to see her more confident in laying clues for the reader as her career progresses: I’ve deleted a paragraph where I went into this in tedious detail, but at present she tends to either give you far too much or absolutely nothing, making this an uneven experience for those of you hoping for a fair-play mystery. Come for the uncommon sleuth and a surprisingly moving closing act, and keep an eye on Emma Mason as a new author with a lot of promise.

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