18th January 2026
It is a few days before Christmas in 1844, nearly a full year on from the events of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. The enlightened Ebenezer Scrooge – now a reformed character and an enthusiastic supporter of the festival – is paying one of his occasional visits to the local graveyard for a chat with his former business partner, the deceased Jacob Marley.
On leaving past “a corner even more tangled and neglected than Marley’s grave site, where a few spaces remained, awaiting new tenants”, Scrooge stumbles across a fresh corpse: a young woman with her throat cut. When, a short time later, Scrooge’s faithful assistant, Bob Cratchit, is arrested and arraigned for her murder, he decides to get to the bottom of the mystery.
Scrooge is aided at various times by Cratchit’s son, Tiny Tim, the latter’s urchin friend Jem and an endearing widow (albeit something of a busybody) called Lucretia Jane Tassell, who has the mistaken impression that Scrooge has been a major contributor to her charitable institution, the Benevolent Feast for the Poor.
We learn fairly quickly that the unfortunate woman was Christina Parley, whose brother Edgar is one of London’s most notorious and ruthless villains. Although Christina herself has indulged in some petty crime, she had been estranged from her brother for some time and living a relatively virtuous – if complicated – life. (The author’s choice of surname has a neat link to A Christmas Carol, an unauthorised version of which was published by Parley’s Illuminated Library in 1844).
The cast-list includes a number of interesting characters – including the wealthy businessman Aldous Scabble and his chemist nephew Alastair Bailey, the jolly printworks owner Felix Merrypaw, Edgar Parley’s right-hand hardman Amos Buddle, and the snobbish Lady Crick with her fragile niece Miss Frome. Scrooge and his colleagues attempt to put together the linkages between these figures – and the nature of Christina’s contacts with them – in order to identify the murderer.
Scrooge also has assistance from other sources. In an echo of the nightmarish visitations that he had in Dickens’s original story, Scrooge is persistently haunted by the cold, wispy ghost of the murdered woman, who initially taunts him in the belief that he had been responsible for her death. In addition, the narrative is regularly interrupted as past events are described from Christina’s ghost’s perspective. Indeed, thus begins the book’s preface; “The pain is sudden and searing. I feel a blow to the back of my head, then a slice at my throat. My hands clasp at my neck as if my fingers can keep the blood inside… I am already on my knees”.
Andreina Cordani writes with a proper reverence for Dickens’s original material. She has a light touch and a nice line in dry humour, not least in reminding us that Scrooge’s pecuniary values have not been totally altered. When he is introduced to the concept of spending money by sending Christmas cards to one’s friends via the penny post, his immediate response is “And then afterwards, what is done with them?” At the same time, there are aspects of darkness in the narrative as other lives are taken.
After being enticed down some dead ends, I – like Scrooge – was fairly confident that I had identified the murderer about two-thirds of the way through the book, the perpetrator’s motives having apparently been clearly signalled. It was another wrong turning, however.
Ebenezer Scrooge does eventually solve the case, of course – with some assistance also received from the spirits that he had encountered a year earlier. I think we might expect some future appearances from him in his new role as a cerebral and empathetic detective.
JR Alexander 