Although much of this book takes place between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, it starts in early December with a murder. Haddam skillfully creates a sense of dread from the first paragraph – a character is waiting for her ride on the common in New Haven at night. A beautiful young woman alone, after dark, in the rain, in New Haven in the 1990’s – I worried for her. I’ve been on the New Haven common at night in the 1990s and even for me, a New Yorker who had lived on the Lower East Side in the 1980’s, it didn’t feel safe. The woman stands for page after page, worrying about how the town has changed, regretting returning, getting hollered at by passing cars. Luckily her ride arrives and he seems like a nice young guy. The car is cozy and he tells her about the health club where they’ll be working together.

The health club is in a remodeled historical mansion in the nice area of town, has a number of aerobic studios, a weight room, a private kitchen, and housing for the teachers and trainers that work there. The club offers a week-long New Year’s special, where participants take aerobic and nutrition classes all day, with healthy lunches included.

The discussion about the club reduces the tension. The woman settles into her room, unpacks, showers, and – when she returns to her room – hears a strange sound outside that sounds like a weird bird. Glancing out the window to see what it is, she sees a naked leg and foot sticking out from under a decorative hedge. She goes out and finds the dead body of the young man who had picked her up earlier.

Haddam then goes on to introduce the characters that the book will follow: the owner of the club, a painfully “healthy” woman who refuses to admit that the years are catching up to her because it would be bad for business; a heavily overweight woman who saved up to treat herself to the overpriced club special as a break from living with her elderly father who has dementia; a younger woman who is facing ostracism from the friends she has kept from high school, who threaten to disown her for wasting money on the club special and for putting on airs since she got that raise at work; an older woman who refuses to accept that her husband is leaving her; the club’s videographer who grew up in the same town as the murder victim; a Yale student who is in determined denial of her breast cancer diagnosis; and a young African-American actor who came to New Haven to act in a show and is using his job at the club to support himself until the theatre begins paying him.

Finally, when “the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot”, Gregor Demarkian arrives at the invitation of the New Haven police, we meet the police detective who has been unable to solve the case in almost a month. Together they go to the club to interview the owners but are distracted before they can by the collapse of an interior balcony railing that collapses into the club’s lobby. It seems like sabotage, aimed at killing the club receptionist (she survives, not even injured, just scared). But why kill the receptionist? Before Demarkian has even get his bearings, the local detective calls in the press and turns the investigation into a three-ring circus, starring himself with Demarkian in a supporting role.

And then he drops Demarkian off at his suburban motel and promises to pick him up the next morning – which he doesn’t, setting up a pattern that continues throughout the week, with Demarkian having to figure out how to navigate and investigate in a strange town without the assistance of a local police detective.

Spoiler: he does just fine.

Demarkian manages to solve not just the original murder and the attempt on the receptionist’s life, but also another murder – or wait, was it two? – and yet another attempt on the receptionist.

In her customary way, Haddam follows each of the main characters through the week, revealing their secrets, having them reveal their own secrets, and discover untapped reserves within themselves, traversing all four quadrants of the Johari Window. Usually, I read about the various characters she introduces and wonder, Who thinks like that? but in this one, I felt like I had a little in common with each of them: the girl who leaves home and moves to the other coast, assuming she’ll have one left and getting another; the woman who has trouble coming to terms with changes her body is going through; the college student who fears breast cancer so much that she does everything possible to avoid accepting the diagnosis; the woman caring for a father with dementia, who can’t find a way out of her situation.

In this book, there’s only one character whose way of thinking was foreign to me: the wealthy woman who dresses perfectly, wears perfect makeup, styles her hair perfectly, keeps a perfect house, and whose husband leaves her for a pudgy woman with naturally grey hair and no makeup, and whose house is comfortably lived in. The wife can’t understand it. Yes, she always assumed he would leave her some day, but for a trophy wife, young and beautiful and perfect in her own way. And she’s peeved that it didn’t work out that way and can’t accept it. She slashes his tires, cancels his credit cards, steals his wallet – and then plots the ultimate revenge to happen on New Year’s Eve. It’s completely extraneous to the murder plot – but Haddam always includes extraneous subplots in her books. In this book, this one stands out because this is the one character that behaves so extremely – usually, most of the characters do.

Despite the distractions, Demarkian is on the track to the solution almost immediately, knows where to find the clues he needs, and just has to find a way to track them down and – oh, oops, another dead body – assemble them into the solution. And then trick the murderer into an arrest without ending up on the nightly news yet again.

And make it safely back to the Armenian-American enclave in Philadelphia, where he can spend a melancholy New Year’s Eve with his family of eccentric neighbors.

Given a choice between spending my New Year’s in a snow-isolated British mansion, recently the scene of a murder and one of Sir Henry Merrivale’s chaotic antics, I choose a cozy Cavanaugh Street New Year’s Eve.