Rating: WARTY!
Read somewhat annoyingly by Carol Higgins Clark, this novel failed to launch, which is sad because it's the first of about four Christmas novels I intend to review this month. I hope the others are better!
Apparently it's something of a tradition for this pair of family members to write a Xmas novel together, and after this I'm thinking that tradition ought to die a natural death under the snow, allowing something fresh and different to spring up next year in its place. This is the second novel I've read that the mom had a hand in, and I'm done with Higgins Clark stories at this point.
This one featured two kidnappers - whose names we knew from the off, so no mystery there - who kidnap the husband of a successful novelist, knowing she can well afford the million dollar ransom. One of the kidnappers is so puerile as to be a joke. It's not remotely possible to imagine that the other guy would ever trust him with something like this - and of course he screws up royally. The kidnappers are so dumb that they follow the plot of one of the writer's novels exactly, yet the police are too stupid to predict what will happen next despite this.
Not that any of the other characters are any more realistic. They're flimsy caricatures, every bit as cheap and nasty as the tinsel and baubles which bedeck a evergreen fir tree at this time of year. They undergo no development. Any one of them could be substituted with a different character and the story would have worked just as badly. The story is larded and puffed up with tedious extraneous detail. These two writers can't introduce a character without describing their hair and age - nothing else, just hair and age! How and why is that ever relevant?! Talking of which, the title of this novel bears no relation whatsoever to the story, which could have been set at any time of the year. It has nothing whatsoever to do with Xmas. The overall impression I got was that this was essentially nothing more than a mercenary attempt to cash in on seasonal excesses, and I can't recommend it.
