Belated Season Greetings!

Oh, I can hear you grumbling: "A Christmas cozy mystery? In January? 'Tis not the season!"

Yes, well, my library hold came in after the holidays so you will just have to lump it.

For Lady Georgiana Rannoch there is nothing like spending time with family during the holidays.

Despite being some off fish at a disastrous dinner party away from the English throne, she is penniless and facing the dreadful prospect of spending the season with her nasty sister-in-law who plans on spending her Christmas begrudging every lump of coal Georgie uses to heat her room in the crumbling ancestral castle. And Darcy O'Mara, her beau of sorts, is traipsing around South America doing mysterious things.

Georgie takes things into her own hands and (gasp!) finds employment. She arrives at a manor house in Tiddleton-under-Lovey to be a social hostess to a cast of characters straight out of an Agatha Christie novel. There's the harried mistress of the manor, the bedroom-hoping leech, the aged colonel with his endless stories about India and dreadful Americans.

Naturally when one has an eccentric cast of characters in one room, murders occur.

And if you ever see this guy across from you at a dinner party, immediately stand up and leave.

The Twelve Clues of Christmas by Rhys Bowen is exactly what it promises to be: Frothy, delicious murder with a slice of suspense and bonus Noel Coward. Bowen is a master; blending romance and crisp English mornings in the frost, jokes at expense of Nouveau Riche Yankees, an eyebrow-raising body count and classic British humour.

It's like my friend's boozy fudge. Every Christmas, and only at Christmas, she makes this luscious melt-in-your-mouth boozy fudge. And when she hands you a tin at the gift exchange, you know exactly what is going to be inside but it doesn't make it any less enjoyable to eat. And such is this perfect present of a book.

But seriously, run.