The nutcracker weighs about as much as a piano. It was carved from a single log, it stands taller than most men, and on the coldest night of December Ella Chambers is dragging it, wrapped in old blankets, out of a mansion basement and across an icy driveway toward a car that is older than she is. She painted it herself, with a child’s brush, the winter she was six and her mother took the housekeeping job at Montgomery Manor. Now the old man who gave it to her is dead, his grandson owns everything in the house, and she has decided she is taking this one thing back. The grandson watches her do it and declines to help, and that small act of spite is where It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Murder by Ally Carter begins.
The next morning, at the diner where she works, Ella climbs onto a chair and tells the whole room that Liam Montgomery means nothing to her and is dead as far as she is concerned. When she turns round, the sheriff is standing in the doorway, holding handcuffs. Somebody up at the manor saw her hauling a heavy, body-shaped bundle to her car. The drag marks on the driveway end in a large patch of blood. The novel builds its whole first act on that grimly funny misunderstanding, and it is a very good joke.
A Nutcracker in the Trunk
The joke works because the object means so much. A nutcracker is traditionally a guardian figure, a soldier set at the window to keep watch, and that is exactly how a frightened little girl used it. Her father had driven drunk into a lake; the town blamed her mother; the apartment over a rich man’s garage was the first place either of them felt safe. Ella slept because the wooden soldier stood by her bed.
So when the adult Ella decides to steal it back, Carter is telling the reader something about her that the heroine would never say aloud. She is twenty-six, her mother is five years dead, and nobody is keeping watch for her. It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Murder by Ally Carter is full of objects that do this kind of quiet work: hand-me-down sweaters from a dead billionaire’s donation pile and a dress borrowed without permission from the unclaimed rail at the dry cleaner’s.
The Help Is the Point
Ella’s tragedy, and the novel’s best subject, is that she is useful. She knows how to unstick the diner freezer and which customer cannot have dairy. She has keys to half the shops on Main Street. Invited to the will reading as a guest, she is handed an apron at the door and asked to keep the caterers out of the study, and she does it without complaint. When suspicion falls on her, the texts arrive one by one: the dog owners will manage, the house no longer needs cleaning, the twins will find a different tutor. It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Murder by Ally Carter handles that sequence with a light touch, and it lands like a blow.
Against her stand the people who have never had to be useful. Bill and Cynthia Montgomery, cut out of the old man’s estate for a single dollar, parked their only son in boarding schools around the world and remember Ella chiefly as staff. Violet Ridgeway, the hotel heiress with the immaculate black bob, makes cutting remarks about Ella’s dress and then proves to be considerably more complicated, and a good deal more loyal, than her entrance suggests. And Grady Sherwood, the sheriff who once sat behind Ella on the school bus, is the town’s one honest institution: the kind of man who picks up a stranger’s gum wrapper from a snowbank without thinking about it. Carter lets the reader feel the difference between those two classes of people in small gestures rather than speeches, and the book is better for it.
Beginning to Look a Lot Like Love
The romance is rivals-to-lovers with two decades of history. Ella met Liam when they were both six and he had a split lip and a bad attitude, and the novel returns again and again to the woods above the manor, where a tree house served as her hiding place. One Christmas, when they were sixteen, the ladder fell and the two of them were stranded there overnight. What the adults decided about that night shaped the next ten years of Ella’s life, and the book unpicks it with real sympathy.
The adult Liam is a provocation: smug, evasive, maddening, and plainly hiding something. Much of the middle of It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Murder by Ally Carter depends on the reader’s patience with his refusals to explain himself, and that patience is tested. But when the truth about him arrives, it reframes earlier scenes in a satisfying way, and the payoff is emotional rather than merely romantic. The love story stays tender and fairly chaste; desire is acknowledged and then the door politely closes.
About That Christmas Day Interview
It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Murder by Ally Carter breaks its narrative with short transcripts. Between chapters, Ella is being questioned on Christmas Day by an investigator from the Colorado state bureau, and her answers are dry, evasive and frequently hilarious. The first of them, before the story begins, has her confessing to a killing. As a hook it is irresistible, and several of the later exchanges work as comic stingers that land the punchline of the previous chapter.
The cost is suspense. Because the reader knows from page one that Ella is alive, articulate and sardonic on the twenty-fifth, any scene in which her life seems to be in danger loses some of its grip. A few of the transcripts are only a line or two long and exist mainly to set up a cliffhanger, which over time feels more like a device than a structure.
The Case Looks a Lot Like Murder
The mystery itself is a pleasant engine rather than a brilliant one. There are other reservations worth stating plainly:
The investigation proceeds largely through visits, in which suspects explain the town’s history over a warm drink, so the middle third talks more than it moves.
Some practicalities are waved through: a serious wound handled with a home first-aid kit, a wireless earbud hidden in a heroine’s hair for a covert interview.
The wealthy grown-ups face consequences that are almost entirely financial, which sits a little oddly in a book this angry about money.
None of that spoils the fun of It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Murder by Ally Carter. The clues are planted, the reveal is staged in the grand manner with everyone gathered in one room, and the town’s interlocking families give the solution a pleasing sense of inevitability. Readers should know that the novel deals with grief, terminal illness, debt, neglect, gun violence and a serious road accident, all handled with care rather than shock.
Where It Leaves You
The book belongs to Carter’s Kiss, Merry, Kill sequence, and it stands entirely on its own; Ella’s name is a nod to the fictional crime writer at the centre of The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year by Ally Carter, which is the natural next read for anyone who wants another snowbound puzzle with a romance attached. Those who enjoy Carter’s quick, bantering couples in a more action-driven register should try The Blonde Who Came in From the Cold by Ally Carter. And for the classic version of a dead patriarch, a contested fortune and a houseful of resentful relatives at Christmas, Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot’s Christmas remains the model.
It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Murder by Ally Carter is a holiday mystery whose real crime is the way people stop seeing the woman who refills their coffee. It begins with a nutcracker being dragged out into the cold, and it ends, fittingly, with someone finally standing guard over Ella.