Martin Edwards says he wants to combine his love of mysteries, puzzles and games in his new book, Miss Winter in the Library with a Knife. However, it’s hard to tell how well he succeeds with this short extract. His introduction states it’s an interactive mystery but any interactive component is not yet there: we simply have an Introduction and three chapters to read, so I can only pass comment upon the author’s written text.

Edwards says he wanted to have fun and we do too: great fun! Character assessments such as “[…] unqualified smartarse with the personality of a piranha and all the compassion of a boa constrictor” and wondering whether a writer had lost the plot made me snigger. Those readers who are familiar with Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers and other detection writers will relish the list of books by Harry Crystal, which includes The Nine Gaolers and Trent’s Last Caper. This is definitely a laugh-out-loud book, even if the subject is murder.

The setting is the north of England, an area that Edwards knows well. His descriptions of the landscape and the bleak wintry weather are evocative: being out on the moors, miles from any settlement, during a snowstorm is a bewildering and scary experience. The village of Midwinter is on that moor, seven miles from its railway station (as is genuinely the case with many old stations on those sparsely used lines). The chapters are interspersed with pages from the village’s website, one of which positions Midwinter as a place where people can go to unwind and contemplate life: “the perfect setting for contemplation, mindful thinking and creative reasoning”, which, of course, describes us readers as we try to solve the mystery.

I’m really looking forward to reading the finished book (or website, depending how the “interactive” component is enabled) but I did have a few quibbles with this very early version. Bernadette Corrigan states in Chapter 1 that there are twenty-five lower case symbols in ancient Greek. I thought (and I am very happy to be corrected) that there are only twenty-four letters (with sigma having two forms: ς at the end of a word but σ elsewhere) and that ν was only the thirteenth letter, not one towards the end of the alphabet. Also, the cipher as shown isn’t split into words. If I’m right (and I do stress IF) that means that the cipher shown and explained in Chapter 1 doesn’t quite work as described. The village website mentions "residents", but I think "guests" is more consistent with the ethos described. Finally, mentioning a car’s trunk rather than its boot did grate, even if it does indicate Edwards’s rightful international popularity.