Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret

It's a hot Australian Christmas, and Ernest Cunningham tells his fiancée Juliette that he's driving up to the Blue Mountains town of Katoomba to vet a magician for their wedding. In truth, he's answering a frantic message from his ex-wife, Erin — whom he finds at the local police station, hands and face caked in dried blood, charged with murdering her partner Lyle, the head of a theatre-based drug-rehabilitation charity.

Convinced Erin has been framed, and unsettled to learn that Lyle had reported an "imminent" homicide to police the day before he died, Ern digs into the foundation's Christmas gala and the tangle of performers, counsellors, and recovering participants around it — racing a ticking clock toward a very public, very dangerous magic show.

Shorter and tighter than the earlier books and structured like a 24-chapter advent calendar, Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret is the third Ernest Cunningham mystery: a festive, self-aware "fair play" whodunit that once again lays its clues out honestly for the reader.