The Very Merry Murder Club
The Very Merry Murder Club, edited by Serena Patel and Robin Stevens, illustrated by Harry Woodgate
Thirteen children’s authors gather around the same deliciously chilly idea: winter is an excellent time for a mystery. Across snowy hotels, Christmas celebrations, ski slopes, frozen landscapes, family homes and unexpected hiding places, young detectives face thefts, sabotage, disappearances, suspicious deaths and clues that refuse to stay neatly buried.
The collection moves confidently between cosy crime, classic whodunnits, contemporary puzzles, historical mystery, fantasy and darker suspense. Readers can follow an autistic sleuth investigating a ballerina’s death, a dance crew attempting a Christmas heist, siblings searching for a missing cat, detectives caught in a peculiar snowbound hotel, a foster child investigating a ski-slope death and many more sharply different cases.
Edited by Serena Patel and Robin Stevens, the anthology brings together stories by Abiola Bello, Annabelle Sami, Benjamin Dean, Dominique Valente, E. L. Norry, Elle McNicoll, J. T. Williams, Maisie Chan, Nizrana Farook, Patrice Lawrence, Roopa Farooki, Serena Patel and Sharna Jackson, with illustrations by Harry Woodgate. Each author creates a complete short mystery, making the substantial 432-page book easy to enjoy one case at a time.
Festive without demanding that every story feel cosy, The Very Merry Murder Club offers considerable variety in voice, setting, family life, culture, disability and detective style. It is a strong Christmas or winter choice for readers who enjoy gathering evidence, spotting red herrings and comparing how different writers construct suspense — with the useful warning that several stories involve fictional murder, death or genuine peril.
