Not a Creature Was Stirring

Not a Creature Was Stirring is the first book in Jane Haddam's long-running (now 30 books and counting) Gregor Demarkian mystery series. Demarkian is a former FBI agent who used to head the agency's Behavioral Sciences Department (which focused on serial killers) but he has since retired to an Armenian neighborhood in Philadelphia where he dabbles in private detective work. In this first novel, he has been invited to a Christmas Eve dinner hosted by a local railroad magnate (Robert Hannaford) with the promise of a $100,000 donation to his church. But when he arrives, he finds Hannaford dead, and his seven disgruntled children seem to all have motives for killing their father. The entire Christmas Eve dinner-for-cash set up is a gimmicky plot device, but Demarkian is an intriguing character and even some of the secondary characters are nicely drawn. And Haddam has some fun with her narrative; at one point in the investigation Demarkian says, "things don’t have to be possible in murder mysteries. They just have to be weird.”