A review by museoffire
A Christmas Homecoming by Anne Perry

2.0

So this is one in a seemingly neverending series of entries in the Anne Perry Christmas mystery collection. For those of you unaware this is a cash gra- ahem series of novella length stories featuring the secondary characters from her Pitt and Monk series finding love and/or solving little baby mysteries of their own.

In this one Caroline Fielding (Charlotte Pitt's mother) and her Jewish actor second husband Joshua have brought their theater company to Whitby to perform the newly written play of their patron's daughter for Christmas. The play is an adaptation of that beloved Christmas classic "Dracula."

No one is murdered until about 3/4 of the way through and the solution arises from Caroline and Joshua "realizing" something the reader has absolutely zero way of knowing that has no connection to anything you've read up to that point.

Until then it's a lot of lofty discussions about the nature of evil, how being in the theater is hard, whether or not woman should choose their own paths in life or stay in the kitchen where they belong and everything ends on a weird, existential cliffhanger.

That and I can never seem to get around the fact that the author is a pretty unrepentant murderer.