HOME FOR THE HOMICIDES

Murder comes to Christmas.

That is, to the adorable little town of Christmas in a painstakingly unnamed state. When news comes to the State Bureau of Investigation (see?) that an unidentified woman has been found stabbed to death by an ornamental icicle and propped against a manger, Big City Commander Davenport orders Special Agent Mark Shepherd to investigate. Instead of sending Shepherd’s regular partner to accompany him, Davenport, who’s something of a grinch, assigns the task to SA Holly Frost as punishment for her consumption of a marijuana-laced brownie while on the clock. Davenport would probably cackle even louder if she knew that Shepherd and Frost had hooked up in a maintenance closet during the last Christmas SBI holiday party and then instantly parted ways. They haven’t spoken since then, and the six-hour drive to Christmas seems longer than Advent. The pair has exactly 12 days to solve the murder of visiting Big City native Anna Olaf (not her real name) in order to clear the books before the town’s famous Christmas Jubilee suffers the fallout. Everything that follows—from Shepherd and Frost’s realization that they make great partners to their growing desire for a hotter kind of partnership to the hints that one of them is hiding a whole bunch of secrets that imperil their burgeoning romance—is so predictable that the periodic wiseguy interruptions by an omniscient narrator are almost equally easy to see coming. But the authors, joining forces for the first time, plant such a remarkable variety of suspects in the innocent landscape that readers are likely to be puzzled, or at least bemused.

Think of it as the 12 days of pre-Christmas. Not that that’s any big surprise, either.