Holiday Cozy

Krissy Hancock is staying in her adopted hometown of Pine Hills, Ohio, for Christmas this year - and she even has a whole week off from her combination bookstore-cafe. Unfortunately, she's been roped into filling in for a sick elf in the local holiday musical extravaganza. With a demanding director, backstage gossip, and two men in fierce competition for the starring role, it isn't all sweetness and Christmas lights. Then a murder puts a stop to the production, and Krissy is faced with a pageant of suspects.

A heart-warming Victorian Christmas mystery with a touch of peril, this story is performed by award-winning narrators Simon Prebble and Wendy Tremont King. When Sir Henry Baskerville, now happily married, invites Sherlock Holmes to Baskerville Hall, that infamous baronial mansion in darkest Devonshire, the entire Baker Street team accepts his invitation for a family holiday. But Sir Henry has an ulterior motive and the powers of evil are at work.

Hemlock Falls is one of the most picturesque villages in Upstate New York, with the Hemlock Inn, owned by the amateur sleuth Quilliam sisters, as its centerpiece. For the Quilliam sisters, there’s nothing jolly about this Christmas. Meg and Quill are near-broke. At least there’s one bright start on the horizon: A big-time magazine and television show will feature the Inn. But soon the editor’s husband skis to his death. Now, if the Quilliams are to save the Inn from a lawsuit, they’ll need to prove this was no accident.

In book 28 in the series, Abby finally has a moment to sit down with the manuscripts her friend Gayla left to her in her will and realizes that the murder Gayla wrote about in her stories might actually be a fictional accounting of the real unsolved murder that were still baffling police a decade after it was a front page story in the local news.

Once upon a Christmas in a quaint and cozy town by the sea, bookstore owners Lou Prescott and Velma Crawford find themselves knee deep in shiny ornaments, strings of garland, and tangled bundles of Christmas tree lights. When full time employee Eden Halliwell introduces them to a teenager with a secret looking for a part time job, the newest merchants in Holiday Bay decide to hire her, which ultimately sets off a chain of events that will change everything.

It wouldn’t be the holidays without a little extra sparkle - and nobody does sparkles quite like Miss Elva. When she decides to debut her Spring resort wear line during a fashion show at Lucky’s, all of Tequila Key turns out for the holiday event. Althea doesn’t know which is more shocking - the fact that the models are wearing glitter boy shorts and Santa hats, or the fact that she kind of wants to see her husband, Trace, in said shorts. Either way, all bets are off when Miss Elva’s eye candy for the night takes a sip of her drink and gets poisoned.

After suffering a personal tragedy, Abby Sullivan buys a huge old seaside mansion she has never even seen, packs up her life in San Francisco, and moves to Holiday Bay Maine, where she is adopted, quite against her will, by a huge Maine Coon Cat named Rufus, a drifter with her own tragic past named Georgia, and a giant dog with an inferiority complex named Ramos. What Abby thought she needed was alone time to heal.

As the holiday season lights up Seattle's famed Pike Place Market, Pepper Reece's beloved Spice Shop is brimming with cinnamon, nutmeg, and shoppers eager to stuff their stockings. Add to the mix a tasty staff competition—a peppermint bark-off—along with Victorian costumes for this year's Dickensian Christmas theme, and Pepper almost forgets to be nervous about meeting her fisherman boyfriend's brother for the first time. But when a young woman working in her friend Vinny's wine shop is brutally assaulted, costumed revelers and holiday cheer are the last things on Pepper's mind.

For all its merriment, Christmas can also bring melancholy-and in Magic Springs, Idaho, Mia finds that the season has brought her an unhappy ghost who's pulling poltergeist-style pranks to get her attention. When she demands an explanation, the ghost just sends a message: Ask Mary Alice-that is, Mia's beloved Grans, who's been training her to develop her witchy talents. If anyone can figure this out, it's Grans . . . even if she still hasn't managed to free Mia's cat from a previous spell that she cast.

This Yuletide, Kelly Flynn and friends are helping the town's librarian, Juliet, teach children how to knit. Juliet has fallen in love-but just as she finds happiness, death finds her, facedown in her Christmas cape. Suspicion falls on a newcomer, a widow with a puzzling past, who-some believe-was sweet on Juliet's boyfriend. But Kelly and her knitting crew aren't convinced. It's up to them to find a killer-before someone else gets fleeced.

It's the Christmas season and veterinarian Kate Turner is not feeling very jolly. She's overworked, unappreciated, and dealing with two dissatisfied clients. Throw in a very complicated personal life and Kate's definitely got a case of the holiday blues. To make matters worse, Kate's ex-boyfriend, Jeremy, is mugged and robbed after they have a heated argument in the hospital parking lot. Then, two of her dissatisfied clients turn up dead (which really gets Kate's tinsel in a tangle). All of these events seem like coincidences, but they add up to something much more venomous.

Welcome to Normal, Kentucky, a small town in the Daniel Boone National Forest and Happy Trails Campground, where the annual Christmas activities are in full swing. But behind the twinkling lights and festive cheer lies a sinister secret. When a local delivery driver is found murdered in Seymore's Candy Cane Factory, suspicion quickly falls on the eccentric cast of characters who call Normal home. From the grumpy old man who owns the candy cane factory, to the bubbly town fiddle player, Otis Gullett, who is secretly in a rendezvous with the factory owner's wife. No one is above suspicion.

It’s autumn in New England and Truly and her fellow Pumpkin Falls Private Eyes are gearing up for the annual Halloween Festival. Aunt True and her new husband, Rusty, have bought Ethel and Elmer Farnsworth’s dilapidated old farm on the edge of town, where they’re going to raise sheep and where Truly and her grandparents have volunteered to farm- and sheep-sit while the newlyweds are on their honeymoon. But as always, there are mysteries and secrets afoot in Pumpkin Falls. Jack-o’-lanterns outside the shops downtown are going missing—in broad daylight!

When a farmer is found dead in his own pumpkin patch, Abby and her tenant Tripp have to find the real killer before an innocent man is put away for life.

After suffering a personal tragedy, Abby Sullivan buys a huge old seaside mansion she has never even seen, packs up her life in San Francisco, and moves to Holiday Bay Maine, where she is adopted, quite against her will, by a huge Maine Coon Cat named Rufus, a drifter with her own tragic past named Georgia, and a giant dog with an inferiority complex named Ramos. What Abby thought she needed was alone time to heal. What she ended up with was an inn she never knew she wanted, a cat she couldn't seem to convince to leave, and a new family she'd never be able to live without.

Kicking off season three of their hit reality TV show Domestic Partners is a home renovation project with an irresistible hook. Woods Hall is a lavish 1913 manor home in the Detroit suburb of Pleasant Woods, once belonging to the town's founding family. It also comes with its own ghost. Twenty-five years ago during a Halloween night party, automotive heiress and beauty queen Emma Wheeler-Woods, wearing a white Princess Diana wedding gown as a costume, fell from a third-floor balcony to her death. Or was she pushed?

Ever since Thanksgiving, when an engagement ring in a velvet box—and no gift tag—was left behind, Poppy and her pals have been left with an unsolved mystery. But at least this mystery isn't the kind that involves murder. That all changes when the body of a fish supplier is discovered in the kitchen of her ex's restaurant—and he's frozen, not fresh. For once, it's not Poppy who tripped over the corpse, yet she can't escape being drawn in since the victim has a note taped to him reading Get Poppy. Figures—an engagement ring isn't labeled, but the dead guy is addressed to her.

Star Clearwater has everything she's always wanted. Her business is soaring, her relationship with her mother is on the mend, and she and her cute, bookish boyfriend Everett are gearing up to attend the big Summer Solstice celebration that promises to be a party like no other.

Depressed at the prospect of spending another Christmas alone, successful crime podcaster Morgan Scott travels to the Endless Mountains of Pennsylvania to research a historic murder. But in the tiny village of Birchardville, past crimes and present dangers collide, placing both Morgan and the local residents in very real peril. This Christmas, there'll be no silent night.

Lumi's life is thrust into seasonal overdrive as throngs of visitors make their way to her family's reindeer sanctuary, eager to sip hot cocoa and visit with Santa's retired fleet. Rumors are swirling that she might be getting a shiny new diamond ring in her stocking this year, but Lumi isn't so sure. If anything, Prince Corbin seems to be giving her the cold shoulder, leaving her to wonder if she's headed for holiday heartbreak instead.