Not all Christmas stories are full of cheer - take the disturbing childhood of Billy Lenz, for example. Born during Christmas, little Billy Lenz suffered from Jaundice because of a liver defect, and was unwanted by his cruel mother (who only saw the husband she’d come to despise when she looked at her son). While she let her true feelings be known to him with beatings and abuse, only his father showed him compassion like a parent should. But on Christmas Eve in 1975, his unfaithful mother gave him one of the most cruelest gifts of all, as she made five-year-old Billy observe his beloved father’s brutal murder at her own hands and those of her lover with a claw hammer. Before burying him under the house, she locked Billy in the attic for good, to hold his silence of what he’d witnessed that night. His only contact from then on was when she came to punish him for making a noise or other such trivial nuisances, while she was with her lover and starting a “new” family. As Billy’s mother fell pregnant with a daughter and treated her with love, which Billy had never experienced with his mother, Billy came out of the attic on Christmas Eve 1991, taking a rolling pin to his mother’s head, and a pointed tree ornament to her lovers eye before leaving his sister as disfigured as he was by blinding her. Before he could finish the job police forced there way in and dragged him off to mental institution and his sister a foster home, whose eye sight was saved in one eye… but not the other. Cut to the present where a security guard has been monitoring Billy’s progress since he came into his care, back in 1991. Knowing full well that during this time for fifteen years, Billy has made a break from this asylum, but never succeeding… until now. Far away, his childhood home is now a sorority house, where nine sisters and their house-mother are celebrating the holiday season together …but tonight they’re about to get a surprise visitor… and it’s not Santa.

Linus and Davis Larrabee are the two sons of a very wealthy family. Linus is all work — busily running the family corporate empire, he has no time for a wife and family. David is all play — technically he is employed by the family business, but never shows up for work, spends all his time entertaining, and has been married and divorced three times. Meanwhile, Sabrina Fairchild is the young, shy, and awkward daughter of the household chauffeur, who has been infatuated with David all her life, but David hardly notices her — “doesn’t even know I exist” — until she goes away to Paris for two years, and returns an elegant, sophisticated, beautiful woman. Suddenly, she finds that she has captured David’s attention, but just as she does so, she finds herself falling in love with Linus, and she finds that Linus is also falling in love with her.

Murder By Numbers is a psychological suspense-thriller that tells the story of a tenacious homicide detective, Cassie Mayweather (’Sandra Bullock’ (qv)) and her new partner Sam Kennedy (’Ben Chaplin’ (qv)) who become pitted against two malevolently brilliant young men (’Ryan Gosling (I)’ (qv) and ‘Michael Pitt (II)’ (qv)) in an ingenious battle of wits as they try to solve a murder case.