Her Last Christmas

by Claire McGowan, Hayley Atwell (Narrator)

“She thought it was their first Christmas together, it turned out to be her last…”

When Emma joins her new boyfriend Michael for a ‘Friendmas’ in the Alps, she’s quickly thrust into an exclusive world of privilege, partying, and politics. Emma can't ski and is out of place among the close-knit group, but she's determined to win them over.

Without the usual headache of extended family members, Brussels sprouts, and unwanted gifts, the group turn back the clock and unwind with wild abandon. As a storm gathers outside, the friends begin to re-trace their past, prodding at memories and feelings that have long been buried.

When the house wakes on Christmas morning, they find one of their party dead. No one is allowed to leave. As the snow piles up, the evidence of the night before begins to disappear and with it goes the ability to distinguish friend from foe.

As the group turn on her, Emma must find a way out before the killer finds her.

From the million-copy bestseller Claire McGowan, and performed by Hayley Atwell, comes a white-knuckled thriller that asks how far people are prepared to go to keep their stories hidden.

Genres: Audiobook, Thriller, Christmas, Mystery, Fiction, Mystery Thriller, Crime

6 pages, Audible Audio

First published November 10, 2025

About the author

Claire McGowan grew up in a small village in Northern Ireland. After a degree in English and French from Oxford University she moved to London and worked in the charity sector. THE FALL is her first novel, which is followed by a series starring forensic psychologist Paula Maguire. She also writes as Eva Woods.

Reviews

[Barbara · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed Claire McGowan’s Her Last Christmas. This is an Audible Original production, and Audible continues to impress me with their consistently high-quality audio dramas.


Hayley Atwell narrates this five-hour performance, and her voice perfectly captures the simmering tension of the story. Set in the French Alps during a snowstorm, the novel unfolds as a classic locked-room mystery—complete with wealthy, privileged guests behaving badly. McGowan paces the suspense beautifully, revealing secrets layer by layer as the storm closes in.


Every character is difficult to like, but isn’t that half the fun with thrillers like this? The unlikability enhances the claustrophobic atmosphere and keeps you guessing about who might snap—or who might already be hiding something deadly.


This is a solid holiday thriller: atmospheric, twisty, and easy to devour in a single day. I genuinely enjoyed the listen and loved Atwell’s performance. A great pick if you want something dark and entertaining to balance out all the cozy Christmas stories.

[Nina (ninjasbooks) · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s been a while since I listened to this, and I still remember the details which aren’t always the case. There was a lot of suspense, and although some of it was a bit cringe I still enjoyed it.

[Lavins · Rating 2 out of 5]

2 stars

Ridiculous.
For a short book, this was pretty long and dragged. The ending was terrible.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this actually. I don’t really get the low ratings. It’s not mind blowing, no. But it’s far from bad, and the amount of time and effort it required of me I feel like made it worth listening too if it seems at all interesting. It’s a short, locked room Christmas mystery/thriller.

Ticked a lot of my favorite boxes: sinister Christmasy stuff, rich people doing rich people shit, rich people being shitty (and violent) to each other, luxurious settings, snowy/stormy/isolated setting. It was quick and easily digestible and not too hard to follow.

Honestly it would have been hard for the author to get me not to like it. lol.

But that’s me. If you’re looking for a quick holiday thriller this isn’t a bad place to start.

[Thibault Busschots · Rating 3 out of 5]

Emma joins her new boyfriend and his posh friends on a Christmas vacation in the French Alps. Emma quickly feels out of place as she isn’t rich, she can’t ski, and the others already know each other so well. Maybe too well.

A body is found. The group blames the outsider, Emma. But, she didn’t do it.


Anyone a fan of The Traitors, the TV show? If so, you know how quickly a group of people can turn on someone. Anyone who stands out in any way. Which is basically everyone, because any excuse seems to be good enough sometimes. And once the group latches on to an idea, they don’t let go. They all get tunnel vision. It’s entertaining, but it’s absolutely awful for the person who’s singled out. That is basically what happens in this novella.


The mystery plot takes way too long to get started for such a short story. All the posh characters are written like they’re annoying, spoiled teenagers, but that’s of course what they’re supposed to be. However, the main character feels like she needs to stand out a bit more, to really make you root for her.


It’s a simple concept that is executed well enough. The mystery plot is foreshadowed and gets better near the end. The story is rather short, though it takes a long time before it gets going. Doesn’t really feel like Christmas though, except for there being snow. Overall, a solid mystery thriller.

[Alisonbookreviewer · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 Stars

Kind of predictable thriller about a murder a ski chalet during a snow storm.
A whodunit with 5 remaining people stranded in the chalet on Christmas day.
Ema is the newest girlfriend to join the couples so she right away becomes the suspect. She also lost her necklace which was planted near the female victim.
The ending was meh.

[Karine · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’ve listened to the Audible during a long flight.
So maybe I’ve been deprived of fresh air for too long or I got seriously dehydrated and that is why I really didn’t like this book at all (the two stars are for the narration).
I don’t know, but I doubt I would have liked it listening from my comfy couch either.
I would expect so much more from this author, I loved the Paula McGuire books, but this was so cookie cutter on all fronts I genuinely cannot find a redeeming quality to it. Oh maybe one: it’s short.

[Candace S. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Friends, if your uber hot and wealthy boyfriend/fiancé/new husband wants to take you to their remote country house/manor/private island/ski chalet for the holidays with their ultra wealthy family or friends, do NOT do it. How many holiday thrillers do we need to teach us that you WILL be sacrificed/murdered/framed by the bored and amoral 1%? It’s not worth it. You in danger, girl.

[TL *Humaning the Best She Can* · Rating 2 out of 5]

Audible audio
----

Not bad but not great either *shrugs* it helped keep depression at bay for a little while and got me out of my own head.

The ending was a bit meh and could have been fleshed out better.

Hayley Atwell did a good job of narrating. Her voice has a soothing quality and helped me stay invested enough to finish.

[Kimberly · Rating 2 out of 5]

Audiobook

The characters were so stupid and the dialogue was ridiculous at times.

[Taury · Rating 3 out of 5]

Her Last Christmas by Claire McGowan is a psychological thriller set in London during the Christmas season, in modern day. What should be a festive time quickly turns dark as secrets, fear, and past trauma surface. The holiday setting adds an unsettling contrast to the tension, making everything feel colder and more claustrophobic. It’s fast-paced, tense, and perfect if you like thrillers that twist something familiar — like Christmas — into something ominous.

[Victoria-Jayne · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm glad it was her last christmas because this whole story was terrible 😂🥱

[Marnie (Enchanted Bibliophile) · Rating 1 out of 5]

For a short story this dragged on forever.
The character was bland and awful.
The suspense smeared on so thickly it had me rolling my eyes.
And the predictability of it all was just a let down.
Also did not enjoy the audio narration.

[Sheila · Rating 3 out of 5]

I received a free copy of, Her Last Christmas, by Claire McGowan, from the publisher and Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. Emma is in the Alps, for the holidays, time is going great until someone is murdered, on Christmas Day. This was a creepy Christmas read, just because you have money and power, does not make you a great friend or person.

[Auudreads · Rating 4 out of 5]

ೃ⁀➷ 4⭐️

Pour être tout à fait honnête je me suis lancée dans cette écoute car c’est un livre offert avec l’abonnement Audible et que c’est la période de Noël donc j’en ai profité.

Au début j’avais un peu la haine car je n’aimais pas du tout les amis de Michael, le copain d’Emma et ça prenait pas mal de place. On ne finit pas par s’y faire et j’avais vraiment envie de 👊🏼 certaines personnes ohlala
Ensuite honnêtement je suis étonnée des si petites notes. C’était hyper addictif, j’avais toujours envie d’en savoir plus, j’avais des soupçons sur des gens puis en fait non, et puis en fait oui.

Par contre la révélation de la fin ? un peu arrivée comme un cheveu sur la soupe.

Michael par contre quel crétin punaise. Je l’ai détesté du début à la fin.
En fait tous les personnages sont détestables. Même Emma au final. Avec tout ce qu’elle voit elle est hyper naïve à toujours se dire si oui mais non c’est pardonnable. Ugh beurk.

Donc c’est pas une lecture ultra agréable en terme de sentiment mais j’étais franchement happée. C’est fluide et ça nous tient en haleine.
Je le recommande si vous avez l’abonnement Audible. C’est 5h d’écoute et c’est franchement sympa.

[C.J. Daley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Grabbed this audible original for a little holiday listening. Narration by Hayley Atwell was certainly a solid selling point too.

Emma joins her boyfriend and his best friends on a Christmas-break ski trip. Truth be told, she was hoping the request to go away meant just her and Michael, but this is a full on Friendmas. Her boyfriend is a politician and all of his friends are in one way or another wealthy. A private chateau in the Alps sounds like a hell of a trip, too bad her boyfriend’s best friends are all snobs. Backhanded and outright hostile comments and insults are hurled even on the first day of the trip. But then the night a snowstorm blows in, virtually trapping them, one of the woman—who has a NOT-so-distant past with Michael—winds up dead in the hot tub outside, either drowned or strangled.

When Emma’s necklace is found outside with a few hairs of the deceased stuck in its clasp, the friends spare no time at all turning on the person they know the least. The author does a good job of handling how alienated you’d feel if this were to happen. There is a class difference (as well as some gross comments), there is a life filled with secrets and inside jokes she’s missed, and worse, she realizes she doesn’t actually know any of them enough to rule them out as killers—Michael sadly included. It also dips into how far money can take you in terms of covering up tragedies AND murders.

The characters are rich business owners, influencers and even a film director. Even though some of them came from nothing, they show a serious lack of understanding and Emma remarks upon the waste of the wealthy more than once. A cleaning staff, that also prepares the food and shops, is told not to speak to the people and Emma is even told to ignore them. They only drink champagne worth hundreds of dollars a bottle and make snide remarks when it’s gone. They show a clear disregard for anyone they consider lesser, and this does a fantastic job of introducing a group of people that you could easily see blaming a murder, even when it was one of their friends, on someone they view as other.

Emma’s trapped on the mountain and all she knows for certain is that there is a murderer among them. As she said yes to the trip more for her boyfriend’s sake than any idea of actual fun, she’s the least skilled skier, and the only chance of escape is down the snowed out mountain. Still she has to try. The ending kind of took me by surprise. Not just in the typical, thriller twist-ending sense, but also the choice the author made. I won’t say more and spoil it, but I think the additional twist at the end, the sort of “I can trust no one but myself” change is what saved it. I don’t mind the more open ending too, as I can imagine what I wanted to happen just fine.

https://fanfiaddict.com/review-her-la...

[Danielle · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was very okay. The narrator is great. 3 stars for the second half redeeming itself, minus the reveal.

[Niamh McAllister · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was batshit fucking crazy.

[Meagan · Rating 3 out of 5]

One rich woman annoyed by other rich people. Yearning to be a politician’s wife is not exactly something you put on a résumé.

[Allyson Anderson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Most of the book was meh but the ending was really bad. Extremely hateable characters also.

[Jo Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 🌟

[Ebony · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was okay for the most part.

I liked the audio production and the voice actor but the story itself was lacking.

The ending was silly, and I wasn’t surprised at any of the reveals. Mostly it was entertaining because of how melodramatic it was. Nicola was the funniest character ever and every time she’d take the piss out of the main character I laughed. Obviously you’re supposed to hate them and route for the main character, but I didn’t care about the wellbeing of any of them, and every time they went skiing it looked so comical in my head lol

Two stars because it’s a stupid plot. Though let it be said that I might read it again next year if I want a good laugh.

[Maythinee Washington · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.9 stars. Can't give it a 3 😅. Mercifully quick thriller jaunt set during the holidays of some terrible rich people and a working class, upwardly mobile woman in her 30s who literally goes past her skis. If it had been longer, all of the faults would have irritated me even more than they did. As it stands, I still think this book could have benefitted from strong editor feedback to make the storytelling more robust (i.e. more HBO or even Hulu and less Lifetime movie of the week—no shade that has its place!). IMHO 1 of 2 things needed to have shifted: either Emma, the criminal law barrister needed to actually be as smart as a criminal law barrister OR she needed to have been a character with some other profession completely unfamiliar with criminology, because I spent nearly the entire time after the mvrder yelling at my girl to wise up, to get *at least* 10% more invested in self-preservation, and at least 100% more self-possessed and not a doormat. The amount of times she *still* clings to her boyfriend, even after [redacted] and [redacted] and [redacted] would be a test case in self-esteem for any therapist, life coach, or self-help guru worth their salt. What is even more ridiculous is that she keeps thinking her choices make her a "survivor" when by novel's end, they really make her an opportunist 🫠

[Joana Faria]

Rubbish.
But fun.
A cozy Christmas thriller that was perfect for my commute, workday, and shopping runs.

[Marie-Christine Roy · Rating 4 out of 5]

J’ai bien aimé, mais la fin; un GROS boff 😂..
Les personnages sont particulièrement détestables mais attachant en même temps.
Bref, j’ai passé un bon moment d’écoute.

[All Things Liz · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an ok audible book. It didn't have any amazing twists or shock factor, but it was a basic "who done it" story. I probably won't remember it in a few weeks, but it passed the time as I was getting some work done.

[Niki Blackwell · Rating 1 out of 5]

Terrible book. Such disgusting material. And The ending was awful. Not worth my time and hours I cannot get back.

[kate ✧ · Rating 3 out of 5]

thought this would be better but i just hated every single character the entire time

[Get Your Tinsel in a Tangle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Michael brings Emma to this absurdly fancy Alpine chalet for Friendmas with the people he’s known forever, and within about five minutes you can tell these people have the kind of friendship where everyone knows exactly who cheated on whom in 2014 and has simply agreed to keep drinking through it. Emma can’t ski, doesn’t have their money, doesn’t have their history, and is trying so hard to be liked by people who have already decided she is basically Michael’s seasonal plus-one. I wanted to grab her by the shoulders and say, girl, they are not worth the frostbite.

And Michael is absolutely no help because he has politician energy in the most exhausting possible way. He’s charming when it suits him, evasive when it doesn’t, and somehow keeps leaving Emma alone to navigate a social group built entirely out of old loyalties, old resentments, old hookups, and people who could weaponize a seating chart. Nicola and Danielle especially made every conversation feel like Emma had accidentally wandered into a private members club wearing the wrong shoes. Cameron was one of the few people I could tolerate for extended periods, and Spencer kept making me think, maybe he’s fine? Followed almost immediately by, no, never mind.

Then everybody starts partying like they are trying to personally erase Christmas Eve from the calendar. They’re drinking, poking at old memories, reopening old wounds, and generally doing the exact thing no group of friends with this much buried history should ever do while snowed into a remote chalet. There are no parents around. No children. No obligations. Just a bunch of wealthy adults deciding to “relax,” which apparently means emotionally dismantling one another next to a roaring fire.

Naturally, Christmas morning arrives with a corpse. And because the storm has trapped them, they can’t just call the police and hand this nightmare over to professionals. Instead, everyone starts looking at everyone else, except somehow they all keep circling back to Emma because she’s the outsider and her missing necklace has conveniently turned up near the dead woman. Excuse me? We have an entire chalet full of people who have been lying to each other since university, but sure, let’s focus on the new girlfriend because she owns jewelry.

This is where I became incredibly invested in everybody’s terrible interpersonal choices. Every new piece of information made someone look worse. Affairs, grudges, betrayals, buried secrets, political ambition, class snobbery, all of it starts sloshing around together while the snow keeps piling up outside. It felt less like solving a murder and more like watching the world’s richest group chat become legally discoverable.

Emma also drove me a little crazy because she is a barrister. A barrister. This woman should be professionally equipped to notice when people are manipulating a situation, and yet there were multiple moments where I was staring at the page like, MA’AM, OBJECT. She keeps trying to smooth things over with people who clearly do not like her, keeps trusting people who have given her no reason to trust them, and keeps treating Michael like he might eventually become useful. Emma, respectfully, this man has been standing nearby while his friends treat you like an unwanted canapé.

But I did get why she stayed. There’s something painfully familiar about wanting so badly to fit into your partner’s world that you keep swallowing little humiliations because admitting you hate everyone means admitting there might be something wrong with the relationship too. Emma keeps telling herself she just needs to get through the weekend, make them like her, prove she belongs. And watching that desire slowly turn into, actually, I may need to survive these people, was the part that worked best for me.

The ending, though, gave me more of a “right, okay then” than a margarita-launching revelation. By the time the final secrets came out, this group had lied, cheated, manipulated, and accused one another so many times that practically any reveal would have made sense. I wanted one more nasty little click where everything suddenly locked into place and made me rethink the entire chalet. Instead, I closed the book mostly thinking that Emma should immediately change her number, delete Michael from every social platform, and spend next Christmas somewhere with fluorescent lighting and several witnesses.

I’m landing at 3 stars for Her Last Christmas. It gave me rich people behaving terribly, a snowed-in chalet, murder on Christmas morning, several people I would happily mute in real life, and enough interpersonal mess to keep me happily snooping. I just wanted the final mess to hit a little harder after all that expensive wine and emotional shrapnel.

Merry Mayhem Prize: For Turning Friendmas Into a Murder Investigation With Better Catering

Thank you to Amazon Publishing UK and NetGalley for the ARC, and for reinforcing my long-held belief that if a wealthy boyfriend invites you to spend Christmas in a remote Alpine chalet with his oldest friends, you should say no, fake the flu, and stay home with a supermarket cheese board where nobody can frame you for murder.

[Naomi Ortiz · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a major who done it book. You truly cant trust anyone especially those who have so much to lose.

It drove me crazy in why she even went on a vacation with your bfs friends who you have never hung out with ! Then she goes and does that at the end ? makes no sense to me.