The Doctor however finds out that the wife is is long lost love who left to be married, and that the sick man has discovered love letters sent between the two many years before. Val has served as a judge for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Man Booker Prize, and was Chair of the Wellcome Book Prize in 2017. A Wife in a Million by Val McDermid, a rather chilling story told in just sixteen pages, As Dark as Christmas Gets by Lawrence Block, masterful tale about a missing manuscript told in forty pages and No Sanity Clause by Ian Rankin. It’s Christmas Eve on the snowy cobbled streets of Victorian London, Suddenly, a scream deep within one of the tenement houses!

Where a woman who’s husband is out of a job, and due to the stress she targets all the supermarkets who turned him down for a job by putting arsenic in food, thus killing people.It was full of short stories, all based around Christmas and the blurb made it sound gruesome, cold blooded and scary. I'd be very surprised if we see any new Christmas set short stories next year as it looks as though the publishing world has moved from crime to ghost stories. This one Father Brown goes to visit a local man who has lost his two elder brothers, who were killed by their adoptive brother. I’ve never been a huge fan of short stories, there’s never quite enough oomph in them and I’m always left wildly disappointed.

Though the murderer, made a mistake and left behind evidence which lead the detective to find out who it was. Though Father Brown sees through his lies and discovered that the brother isn’t the made he says he is; he is the adopted son, and the body is of the last brother he killed earlier, and has be pretending to be him the whole time. However, just because many of the others are quite short doesn't mean that they fail as stories, just that they tend to focus on a relatively small element of the 'how could that have happened?Val McDermid has published twenty-eight crime novels, which have sold millions of copies worldwide, been translated into sixteen languages and won multiple awards. A fairly quick, easy read for anyone who’s a fan of this genre to get stuck into over the Christmas period (or anytime really). They may have improved if I had persevered but I had other books that I would rather be reading over the festive period. There are six, seven to eight suspects all who have read and handled the manuscript throughout the night, though none of them took it. The boy, who was known to the victim, was arrested nearby a short time later, and is in custody at a south London police station.