The Christmas guest by Peter Swanson – book review

Peter Swanson is well and truly back! He redeems himself with this book after a series of duds across last few years. He started off with a big bang in “Kind worth Killing”, “Girl with Clock for a heart” and “Her every fear”. But was unable to match up to the bar he had set for himself. His next releases were bad or borderline average to say the least. With “Christmas Guest”, his smallest in terms of number of pages, I guess he has found back his story telling form.

Like Agatha Christie, who had a penchant for producing brain twisting plots, even though they were majorly set within a closed setup – be it a single room or a house or on a ship or train for that matter. She was the queen of mysteries related to confined spaces. Swanson’s strength is on Point of view kind of storytelling. One of the other reasons that I prefer reading him being, there are only a handful of characters with simple sounding names. Each of those characters are reinforced on the readers, chapter after chapter, where they narrate the story from their perspective and take it forward. It never confuses and since the way of taking the story forward is primarily through dialogues and conversations, I personally find his books easier to read and for faster read. The kind of twists that he comes up are the icing in the cake that really takes the stories to another level. Some may be gruesome and are always downright dark. But when you are reading a murder mystery, you have already set yourselves up for what’s coming, isn’t it?

This book begins with a lonely lady who spends her holidays to herself and like most years finds herself alone during Christmas. There is a mention of another woman who at times used to visit her during holidays but has been absent for last few occasions. While trying to clean up her closet off things that can be disbursed to charity, she comes across her personal diary. She begins to reminisce about the contents and about the time she had then with the story getting narrated from her perspective as jotted in the diary. The diary ends abruptly, with a news clipping about a violent incident involving herself and her friend, one of whom gets killed. The second part of the story begins with a narration of a character, revealing information about which or about the violent incident would be an outright spoiler.

I liked the book. It was very small running at under 100 pages. For those who are familiar with earlier works of Swanson, it may sound like a repeat theme. But having mentioned that he has set such type of story telling as his presentation mode, it is only to be expected. The theme is anything but Christmasy, expect for the fact that it all happens around Christmas time. 

I would recommend this as the first book for those who want to follow Peter Swanson, for it gives a good glimpse of what to expect in his other books.