UK Book Club discussion

With the festive season just around the corner, it's time to pick something with a Christmas flavour, or a book set in the depths of winter - take your pick.

If you're stuck for ideas, handily the group read this month is Hercule Poirot's Christmas - you are very welcome to join us.

Previous books in this realm that I've enjoyed include: A Christmas Carol, The Snow Child, Snow by John Banville, The Siege by Helen Dunmore, Winter's Bone and Misery. All very good, but mostly in the winter category and generally without the Merry Christmas spirit ;)

This time around, I will try to read The Terror by Dan Simmons, as well as good old Hercule Poirot.

Can anyone suggest a few jolly Christmas reads? What will you be reading?

Small Things Like these by Clare Keegan is one of my favourites!

Jolly Christmas reads? A lighthearted mystery is Charlotte MacLeod’s Rest You Merry, set at a New England agricultural college during the Christmas holidays.

I romped through Hercule Poirot's Christmas and I'm now thoroughly embedded in The Terror...

I have just started The Santa Klaus Murder. Its a typical big house murder mystery written in the 1930s so it has Agatha Christie vibes. Handily there's a plan of the house and a list of the family & associates at the front so I feel well prepared to solve it! The setting is a family gathering at Christmas so I'm hoping the festive season is well and truly in evidence throughout.

I've finished The Santa Klaus Murder. I gave it 4 stars. It was a great mystery although I had a bit of deja vu so I don't know if I read it a long time ago or maybe there was a TV/film adaptation that I may have seen at some point. Still it was a good read and has rounded off the year well.

I really enjoyed The Terror. On the one hand, it's an excellent historical novel about Franklyn's failed expedition to find the North West Passage (from Greenland, over the top of Canada to the Pacific Ocean), on the other hand, there's a creature stalking the explorers on the ice... It shouldn't really work, but it does!