Christmas Card Murder

by Leslie Meier, Lee Hollis, Peggy Ehrhart

Overview

Join bestselling authors Leslie Meier, Lee Hollis and Peggy Ehrhart for a collection of the coziest Christmas capers! Everyone dreams of a picture-perfect small-town Christmas, but when murder is in the cards, some holiday greetings are addressed to kill...

Christmas Card Murder by Leslie Meier
In the midst of holiday home renovations, Lucy Stone accidentally unwraps a murder mystery decades in the making when she discovers an old Christmas card with a nasty message belonging to one of her farmhouse's previous residents. The case may be colder than a New England Christmas, but Lucy's determined to sort it out before Santa comes to town.

Death of a Christmas Carol by Lee Hollis
The Island Times Christmas soiree gets off to a scroogey start when Hayley Powell, Mona Barnes, and Rosana Moretti receive a Christmas card from the town flirt, Carol Waterman, who threatens to run off with one of their husbands! The ladies chalk it up to an imprudent prank...until they find Carol mistletoe-up under her tree...

Death of a Christmas Card Crafter by Peggy Ehrhart
Slay bells ring when the body of Arborville High School's beloved art teacher (and annual Christmas card designer), Karma Karling, is discovered on the first day of the Holiday Craft Fair. Now, Pamela Paterson and the Knit and Nibble crew must swap swatching for sleuthing in order to put a Christmas killer on ice.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781496728227
Publisher:	Kensington
Publication date:	10/27/2020
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	8.30(w) x 5.60(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Leslie Meier is the acclaimed author of over twenty-five Lucy Stone Mysteries. She has also written for Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, and like her series protagonist, Lucy Stone, she worked as a New England newspaper reporter while raising her three children. She is currently at work on the next Lucy Stone mystery and can be found online at LeslieMeierBooks.com.

Peggy Ehrhart is the author of the Knit & Nibble Mystery series and the Maxx Maxwell Mysteries. A former English professor, she holds a Ph.D. in medieval literature from the University of Illinois and taught writing and literature at Queens College, CUNY, and Fairleigh Dickinson University, where she was a tenured full professor. Her short stories have appeared in Futures Mystery Anthology Magazine, Crime and Suspense, Flashing in the Gutters, Spinetingler, Crime Scene: New Jersey 2, and Murder New York Style. A longtime member of Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime, Peggy served on the board of MWA New York as head of the Mentor Committee. She was president of Sisters in Crime NY/TriState from 2013 to 2015. Peggy regularly attends mystery writing conferences and participates in conference panels and also gives talks on mystery fiction at libraries in New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey. Visit her online at PeggyEhrhart.com.

Lee Hollis is the pen name for a brother and sister writing team. Rick Copp is a veteran film and television writer/producer and also is the author of two other mystery novel series. He lives in Palm Springs, California. Holly Simason is an award-winning food and cocktails columnist living in North Carolina.

Editorial Reviews

09/14/2020

A Christmas card provides the starting point for each of the three entertaining novellas, which star a series protagonist from each of the authors, in this welcome anthology. In the title tale, bestseller Meier’s Lucy Stone, a reporter for the Tinker’s Cove, Maine, Penny Saver, is in the midst of renovating her home when she comes across a decades-old Christmas card addressed to a girl, now a deceased adult, with a disturbing message inside related to a crime. Her quest to discover the story behind the card leads her to revelations about a more recent crime. In “Death of a Christmas Carol,” Hollis echoes the plot of the 1949 film A Letter to Three Wives when Hayley Powell, office manager for the Bar Harbor Island Times, and her two best friends receive a collective Christmas card telling them that one of their husbands has run away with a local temptress. “Death of a Christmas Card Crafter” finds Ehrhart’s Pamela Paterson, founder and mainstay of the Arborville, N.J., Knit and Nibble knitting club, investigating the death of a much-loved art teacher and Christmas card designer. All feature appealing characters and straightforward plots. Cozy readers seeking undemanding escape from real-life holiday hoopla will be satisfied. Agents: (for Meier) Meg Ruley and Christina Hogrebe, Jane Rotrosen Agency; (for Ehrhart) Evan Marshall, Evan Marshall Agency. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

2020-08-19
Three Christmas greetings bring clues to murder.

Meier’s title story presents Lucy Stone on the verge of realizing a lifelong dream. Since three of their four children are grown and living on their own, she wants her carpenter husband, Bill, to knock out the wall between their cramped bedroom and an adjacent room to create a luxurious master suite. As Bill bangs away at the lath and plaster, Lucy finds an antique Christmas card with a nasty message hidden in the baseboard. Lucy’s search for the sender circles back to the long-ago murder of a high school student. Although her inquiry has moments of high drama, including a blizzard that shuts down the town, the solution is a letdown. The miserable missive in Hollis’ Death of a Christmas Carol is sent by Carol Waterman to three friends: Hayley Powell, food writer for the Island Times; Rosana Moretti, wife of the Times’ publisher; and Hayley’s friend Mona Barnes, a lobsterwoman. Borrowing from the classic film A Letter to Three Wives, Carol’s card reveals her plans to run off with the husband of one of the friends, plans that are foiled by her death. Neither the solving of the mystery nor the unmasking of the errant spouse offers any holiday cheer. Ehrhart’s Death of a Christmas Card Crafter tells the sad tale of popular high school art teacher Karma Karling, whom readers never meet before her body is found in a local Christmas tree lot. She leaves behind the last of a Twelve-Days-of-Christmas–themed series of cards featuring not 12 but 13 drummers drumming. Neighbors Pamela Paterson and Bettina Fraser use that extra image to track down Karma’s killer—a solution that comes so far out of left field it could have been sent there by Willie Mays.

Three tepid treats for the holiday season.

Kirkus Reviews