REVIEW: Mistletoe and Murder

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Mistletoe and Murder: Robin Stevens (Puffin 2016)
A Murder Most Unladylike/Wells and Wong mystery

As alluded to at the end of the previous book in the series, ‘Jolly Foul Play’, Hazel and Daisy go to Cambridge for Christmas, meeting all the members of the Junior Pinkerton society. Inevitably, they come across a mystery or two and it’s no surprise that murder is committed soon thereafter.

This was my Christmas Day book – I’d pretty much decided to read it then when I bought my copy. I read it in three sittings, and I’m still trying to decide what I made of it. Stevens uses the very English setting of Cambridge c.1935, where women were treated as second-class citizens, and ‘not English’ people like Chinese Hazel and Alfred Cheng, and the Mukherjees, British-born but of Indian descent, face outright racism and more insidious treatment, to examine Hazel’s sense of identity. There’s also a sense of looking forward to the future, to growing up, to whether the girls will want to go to Cambridge and have to work ten times as hard as their male peers and not get a degree after doing so. While Daisy is caught up in proving that their (her) detective society is better than the boys’ until Hazel and the exigencies of the case prevail and they work together, the presence of the boys makes even her and certainly Hazel have to face up to awkward teenage feelings. They are on the cusp of growing up, still treated as children, still children in many ways, but aware that this will change, and changing because of their experiences.

Those experiences include having solved four murders and now investigating another deadly case. Daisy’s brother Bertie is at Maudlin College (well played, Stevens). Still badly affected by what happened at Fallingford, related in ‘Arsenic for Tea’, he seems to have got into a bad crowd, with the quarrelling Mallingford twins. Donald, the elder, is about to come into his inheritance and things are fraught with his younger brother Chummy. Bertie seems to have been more interested in his secret climbing society than in studying, unlike Amanda Price, the student who is meant to be chaperoning Daisy and Hazel, but lets them wander alone, which is handy for their detecting.

They’re not alone, Alexander, whom we first met in ‘First Class Murder’, is in town along with George, the President of their detecting society, who’s own older brother is studying and/or climbing buildings at night in Cambridge. Hazel still has a crush that’s probably hopeless on Alexander, who only has eyes for an uninterested Daisy. Meanwhile, in George, there is another Daisy or Holmesian figure – logical, bossy – but he’s an outsider and capable of noticing things that Daisy isn’t. As is Hazel.

As pranks turn serious, very serious, students and adults act suspiciously. The two detecting societies make their lists, compare notes and investigate where plodding police constables cannot and adults would rather they did not.

It was a quick read, perhaps less funny than the books where the girls are a little younger. Here, you feel the weight of the previous murders on the Wells siblings and sensitive Hazel herself – for her, coming across dead bodies is a horrible thing. Racism and sexism – the girls stay at St Lucy’s College, a women’s college, where the food is tinned as very little money is spent on them, in contrast to the princes of Maudlin – had to be faced, but it feels very much like a 2010s book about the period, and it slightly drags things down. I’m torn, because I like series taking on what’s come in the past, but Wells and Wong are growing up and their secret society isn’t so secret any more.