“A Christmas Homecoming” by Anne Perry (Ballantine; 224 pgs., $18)

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — For this, the ninth in her series of Christmas mysteries, the indefatigable Anne Perry tries something different. “A Christmas Homecoming” could have been devised by Agatha Christie, and happens to take place at Christmas, but otherwise has nothing to do with the holiday. Nevertheless, if you like mysteries, and if you like Perry, it repays the reading.

Perry takes as her main character Caroline Fielding, the mother of Perry’s popular Charlotte Pitt. Caroline has thrown over her old life — and scandalized Victorian society — by marrying Joshua Fielding, an actor 18 years younger than herself. Despite the outrage, she has never been happier.

Fielding and his theatrical troupe have come to Whitby, a small fishing village best known as the site where Dracula comes ashore in Bram Stoker’s novel, which in Perry’s book is a newly published sensation.

Not coincidentally, the troupe is putting on a private production of “Dracula” for Charles Netheridge, a rich man who has promised to bankroll the troupe’s coming season if they will humor him by producing his daughter’s adaptation.

The setup is more convoluted than Perry’s standard, but things begin to quicken because of a knock on the door. It seems that a carriage has broken down, and a man named Anton Ballin asks for shelter from the storm.

Ballin is tall, handsome, with prominent cheekbones. He is also unusually pale, and knows a great deal about vampires. As the snowstorm rages outside, pinning everybody inside the house, Ballin offers Joshua Fielding lots of helpful advice about how best to present the terror wrought by the great lord of the undead — Count Dracula.

Perry plays with our expectations, then intensifies them: Ballin is found dead, with a broomstick driven through his chest. And then the body disappears.

Caroline feels she has to do something to solve the mystery, perhaps because she doesn’t really have much else to do — not an actress, more of a helpmate, she seems to be Perry’s more or less successful stab at reconstituting Miss Marple in the Victorian era.

It goes without saying that Ballin was not really an unfortunate driven to a remote country house by circumstance, but it also goes without saying that appearances in a novel by a modern master like Perry are deceiving.

What is not deceptive is the author’s insistent belief in good and evil. “I used to believe the battle between good and evil was something of a fairy story,” Caroline says at one point. “Now, as I get older and have seen more, I believe it is real. We need redeeming so desperately. We need hope because without it we have nothing.

“If there is a God, then mercy and renewal must be possible, even if we understand only a little of it, and nothing at all of how such redemption works. We get so much wrong, make so many rules, because it deludes us into thinking we have control of what goes on around us. We don’t, and we shouldn’t want to.”

This could stand as a testament for a writer of moral tales who believes in what she writes, and it can stand as well for the characters that populate this curious but consistently interesting series of novels, which habitually juxtapose savage murder with the reflexive hope embodied in the Christmas holiday.