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Title: The Christmas Carol: A Jayne Sinclair Genealogical Mystery

Author: M J Lee 

Format: Paperback or Kindle

Published: 2020

Synopsis: (from Amazon) “When an antique dealer asks Jayne Sinclair, genealogical investigator, to discover the provenance of a first edition of Charles Dickens’, A Christmas Carol, she is faced with one of the most difficult  challenges of her career. How does she find the family of the mysterious man in the hand-written dedication, when all she has is a name, a place, Victorian Manchester, and a date, December 19, 1843? She has just three days to uncover the truth before the auction.  Even worse, she faces spending her own Christmas alone; her family having decided to visit relatives in Scotland. Jayne is in a race against time to find the family of the man and the reason why Dickens wrote the dedication. Even more, she has to dig deep within herself to find  the true joy of Christmas. A secret discovered by Charles Dickens many years ago. Can she find the truth behind a Christmas past to deliver a Christmas present?”

My Rating:

M J Lee, author of the Jayne Sinclair Genealogical Mystery series recently released The Christmas Carol, just in time for Christmas. It’s a little shorter than other books in the series, but it still has the hallmarks of the books that have come before it. A nice, quick, holiday-related read, this book helped to get me in the mood for Christmas in this crazy year we call 2020. As with the other books in the series, this book takes place in both the present and the past, and as usual, Lee does it well. It can be read as a stand alone book, or you can binge the whole series (see below).

If you’re new to Lee’s genealogical mystery series, you might want to start at the beginning, just so you can get sucked in and follow Jayne from the first book forward. Here is a listing of the series in order of publication:

  1. The Irish Inheritance
  2. The Somme Legacy
  3. The American Candidate
  4. The Vanished Child
  5. The Silent Christmas
  6. The Sinclair Betrayal
  7. The Merchant’s Daughter
  8. The Christmas Carol