Every year, I look forward to Anne Perry's annual Christmas novella. Each year it features a different mystery, often with characters drawn from her other books, but always with a strong redemptive tone. This year's offering, A Christmas Message (#611), follows through with that tradition.
Readers of her Thomas and Charlotte Pitt mysteries will be familiar with Lady Vespasia Cummings Gould now married to Thomas' former boss, Victor Narraway, late of Special Services. Narraway has gifted his wife with a Christmas time trip to Jerusalem, a part of the world she has never seen. The British have built a railroad connecting the coastal city of Jaffa with Jerusalem, but there is only one train a day each way. While waiting for their train the next day, Lady Vespasia and her husband enjoy a pleasant meal at their inn with a fellow traveler, only to find him brutally murdered later that evening. Victor finds a mysterious scrap of an undecipherable document in his pocket with a note from their dinner companion asking them to deliver it to a certain address on the Via Dolorosa by Christmas Eve.
Neither of them could have anticipated the danger that will follow them, nor the way the journey forces them to confront their own beliefs. Which journey will shake them to their core more strongly? The physical dangers they face, or the metaphorical ones?
This novella is probably the most metaphorical work of Ms. Perry that I have read; it poses many of the biggest questions in life and makes the reader pause to consider one's own beliefs and values. A novel approach to theology in action.
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