Eleven Pipers Piping

Benison, C. C. Eleven Pipers Piping. New York: Delacorte Press, 2012.


Rev. Tom Christmas (also known as "Father Christmas") investigates when one of his parishioners turns up dead after a very snowy Burns Day dinner which he attended. There's some delay in getting investigators there. Although it appears to have been natural to most persons present at the dinner, there's still some suspicion about the circumstances of the man's death which turns out to be well-founded. The book is written with an occasional letter from one of the household staff to her mother interspersed in the narrative. Whether it is because I had not read the earlier installment or for other reasons, I never really connected to the characters in the book. There was a list of characters in the front which was helpful because of the number of persons in the narrative. I felt that the narrative was unnecessarily wordy in places and that the writing could have been tighter. Careful editing could have reduced this book from almost 500 pages to about 350 which is much more typical of this type of book. This review is based on an advanced e-galley received courtesy of the publisher through NetGalley.  (3 stars)