Donna Andrews has been, for a while, on a two-book-a-year contract. This novel, her 36th in the series, is this year’s Christmas offering. The set-up, the situation, is pretty clever. In Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, at the very posh Caerphilly Inn, on December 20th, the eve of the winter solstice—the darkest evening of the year, as Robert Frost has taught us—there is a conference on the subject of wrongful conviction and incarceration. People with different skill sets have assembled for talks and panels. There are policemen, lawyers, forensic experts, DNA experts, detectives, all knowledgeable about how the criminal justice system works and the ways in which it can go awry: through error, incompetence or malice.
Also present for these panels are several individuals, men and women, young and old, who have themselves been convicted and imprisoned for homicide and are now released pending retrial or some other procedure. One man had been wrongly imprisoned for fifty years. Most of them are still not quite in the clear. We learn that in the USA, of the two million people in jail, anywhere from one to ten percent are innocent, somewhere between 20,000 and 200,000 incarcerated people.
In a Donna Andrews mystery all but the slowest reader will know quickly who the victim will be. Andrews has a gift for creating “nasty, toxic, unpleasant” characters. In this case, an attendee at the Presumed Innocent conference is a man wearing a black T-shirt that reads “I See Guilty People.” He is a real gadfly, proclaiming on podcasts, the internet and in person that convicted people are guilty and operations like the Innocence Project let killers loose on society. As if this was not convincing enough, Mr. Godfrey Norton is caught stabbing a small lovable dog in the forehead with an escargot fork. He’s a goner.
Winter weather, including snow, sets in and the novel becomes a kind of expanded “closed room” mystery—except in this case the ”room” is an entire hotel, and all the suspects are either knowledgeable criminal justice people or else individuals already convicted, rightly or wrongly, of murder, and every one of them will know way more than the average person how to avoid leaving clues or making stupid mistakes. The police go to work, checking alibis and trying to ascertain, through the Inn’s CCTV system, whether a guest could have slipped out of the Inn and back again. Some went to town or for walks in small groups. The “group activity” murder of “Murder on the Orient Express” is mentioned more than once.
The killer is discovered, naturally, and to offset the pall that the murder casts on the season, Meg’s sister-in-law, seriously pregnant, goes off to the hospital to give birth and in so doing, demonstrate that even at the darkest time of the year, life goes on, new life appears, and each upcoming day will have more light.
