The Secret Christmas Library by Jenny Colgan

The Secret Christmas Library

 By Jenny Colgan

 William Morrow 2025

Jenny Colgan is a best-selling author of more than forty novels, which makes her latest effort, The Secret Christmas Library, a bit of a head-scratcher. It's a cozy mystery/romance that starts off with anything but best-seller-level writing.

Mirren Sutherland works as a quantity surveyor in London. She's fresh off a side adventure with Theo Palliser, a handsome finder of antiquarian books. As a result of that pre-story encounter, Mirren has a plaque in the British Museum next to a rare book she discovered. While admiring her plaque one evening, she overhears a good-looking man asking a security guard questions about her. She interrupts and introduces herself. The thirtyish man, a Scot named Jaime McKinnon, says he wants to hire a book hunter and gives her his card. Mirren is not interested, but later mulls over the offer. She's a surveyor not a book hunter, despite her side adventure. She calls McKinnon and says she'll think about it. When she gets to her office the next day, her boss is thrilled that "someone" has asked for a surveyor to come up to Scotland to assess a property's suitability for renovation. Knowing that "someone" must be Jaime, Mirren heads to the train station where her cellphone is promptly stolen by a punk on an electric bike.

By this point there's a high likelihood discerning readers will already be disappointed and/or confused. Beyond multiple instances of careless writing, juvenile dialogue, and bad assumptions, Cogan's attention to simple logic and accuracy is conspicuously poor. Mirren thinks back on how McKinnon approached her in the museum, but it was Mirren who had approached McKinnon. This happens twice until Cogan switches back to the correct sequence. How did McKinnon manage to get Mirren assigned specifically to his request for a surveyor? And secure a train ticket? All before she arrives at the office the next morning? And when Mirren's cellphone is stolen, she desperately tells a nearby policeman "I need my phone! Can you get it back?" with the ludicrous implication he can just wave his wand and summon it, Dumbledore-style.

After some maneuverings, Mirren catches her train. On board is Theo, who, of all the antiquarians in the UK, somehow has also been hired to find McKinnon's book. Hours later the two arrive at a Highland train station and McKinnon takes them to his castle. Turns out, he's a lord. He needs to find a rare, unidentified, potentially priceless book that his deceased grandfather has hidden somewhere in the castle. It's the only way McKinnon can raise enough money to keep the property. To that end, his grandfather left McKinnon a riddle-poem as the only clue. To make matters more difficult, McKinnon's grandfather was a hoarder. Every room, corner, and closet of the castle is bursting with books.

From here on it's a treasure hunt. We follow Mirren, Theo, and McKinnon as they try to find the mysterious book . . . and perhaps love along the way. Unfortunately, Colgan's writing not only continues to be inarticulate and illogical, it gets worse as it goes. Clues are vague and ill-described. Character reasoning is implausible. Questionable events blossom to absurdity by the time we reach the story's climax. Somehow characters can see through a blizzard by the light of a Zippo? Somehow small flames can race across a snow-covered landscape like a California wildfire? And there's plenty more where those belief-beggars came from. As a bonus, an observant reader with the tenacity to finish the story might realize The Secret Christmas Library never included a secret Christmas library at all.

Though the ratio of bad-to-good writing in this book is far from great, Colgan can clearly create solid prose. Take this description of Mirren's first sight of the McKinnon castle:

There were two square gatehouses at the front, in plain grey stone, linked by a bridge over the road, before the main building itself, and the white section was covered by a variety of low stone buildings: stables, barns, and cottages. It was more than a castle: it was practically a town. From the tallest of the turrets a Scottish saltire flew proudly, but from another was a long, fluttering pennant in red and yellow, following the breeze out to sea. Mirren couldn’t take her eyes off it. It was devastatingly romantic. Her eyes followed it longingly. Imagine. Imagine having a tower with a pennant streaming, like a princess in a storybook. It was glorious.

Later, when Mirren is up close, she sees the castle is actually riddled with imperfections and places where it's downright falling apart. Which is an apt analogy for this conclusion. If one can read The Secret Christmas Library without looking too closely, perhaps one might find it romantic or even glorious. But any examination closer than a half mile will certainly uncover the multitude of its faults. Faults that frankly should have been repaired well prior to publication.

Jim Abbiati is a writer, book reviewer, and IT professional living in Mystic, Connecticut. He's the author of Fell's Hollow, The NORTAV Method for Writers, and has an MFA in Creative Writing from National University