The Christmas Murders

The Christmas Murders is what might happen if Charles Dickens took a hard drag of Kierkegaard and decided A Christmas Carol hadn't gone nearly far enough. Set in the soot-choked town of Werseby, where charity freezes faster than the river, it follows Lady Catherine Dryden-a woman of means, manners, and mortification-and Father Flynn, an Irish priest whose accent alone could absolve sin. When a factory boy turns up dead and Lord Dryden follows him shortly thereafter (in what the polite call "an unfortunate coincidence"), the pair wade into a moral fog thick enough to choke a saint. There are ghosts, yes-but not the clanking-chain variety. These are the spectral byproducts of conscience: greed, cowardice, neglect-the whole industrial catechism of sin. And on one terrible, holy night, as the wind howls through Werseby's alleys, Catherine must face the small, shivering ghost of a girl she once refused. It's a Christmas story, after all-not the sentimental sort, but the kind that insists redemption, if it comes at all, must first walk through the snow in bare feet.