This book launches the Peter Shandy mystery series – and it’s totally enjoyable.

Peter Shandy is a middle-aged professor of agronomy at an agricultural college in rural Massachusetts. It’s a utopia of a college, with students who faithfully eat at the school cafeteria because the food is so good, and students faithfully attend class, learning how to become better farmers. The school is led by a giant of a Viking, assisted by his beautiful wife and his family of beautiful daughters.

School spirit runs high at Balaclava Agricultural College, and the holiday season takes over the campus, with students dressed as elves pulling visitors and staff about on sleds and candy-striped booths selling homemade holiday-themed chocolate treats – all to raise funds to support scholarships for students who couldn’t otherwise afford to go to college.

And the most spiritous event of all: the holiday house-decoration contest, faithfully adhered to by the professors and staff, who all live on campus on long-leased houses rented from the school.

With one exception: Peter Shandy.

Pleasant in a sweater-vest sort of way. Perhaps slightly on the spectrum. Peter Shandy refuses to decorate his home, holding out against the threats from his boss (the Viking), the jeers of his neighbors, and the in-his-face pressure of his best friend’s overbearing wife.

Finally unable to put up with the pressure any longer, Peter spends a little of his wealth¹ hiring two men from an exterior decorating company to show up with a truck full of visually and audibly loud house and yard decorations, wired to a newly-installed electrical timer under strong lock and key. Once everything is set up to start that evening, he hitches a ride out of town on the delivery truck and boards a cruise.

Unfortunately, the ship runs aground and he is forced to slink back to campus on Christmas Eve, only to find that someone has disconnected his deliberately-obnoxious holiday display. Perhaps someone with a key to his house – the campus security office (which keeps keys for all the houses) or perhaps – he finds, as he trips over her body, his best friend’s wife, using the key he left with them for emergencies.

So who killed his best friend’s wife and why?

The fun begins at this point, as we meet the denizens of Balaclava, all delightfully eccentric, caricatures of students, professors, staff, and townies. And then she introduces Helen, Peter Shandy’s love interest, a demure young woman with unsuspected skills, who helps Peter solve the mystery and becomes engaged to him by the end of the book. She’s a little older than MacLeod’s usual heroines but, otherwise, par for the course.

I love the Peter Shandy mysteries – and this is one of the best, perhaps because you are meeting everyone for the first time. Perhaps because the characters and situations only become more extreme as the series goes on.

If you like holiday mysteries, this is a good one to add to your collection.

1. Resulting from his patent on the Balaclava Buster, a root vegetable designed as low-cost, healthy animal feed. ↩︎