by Cleo Coyle
Part of Coffeehouse Mystery
First published 2010
Clare Cosi is managing the Village Blend when she finds a man in a Santa suit dead in the snow outside her Greenwich Village coffeehouse. The holidays just got a lot darker. Clare can't leave it alone. She starts pulling at threads, and what she finds is that this particular Santa was keeping a list of people who had done him wrong. The list is long. The names on it belong to people with real reasons to want him gone. Clare has to move carefully. She is running a busy coffeehouse through the Christmas season, keeping her staff on track, and trying not to get herself killed while she figures out who turned St. Nick into a corpse. The case takes her deeper into the victim's private life, where grudges and secrets have been building for years. Cleo Coyle keeps the mystery grounded in the rhythms of daily work and neighborhood life, and Clare's determination to find the truth feels less like heroics and more like something she simply cannot help doing.
Genres: mystery, crime, contemporary, adult, adult-fiction
Vibes: atmospheric, character-driven, cozy, grounded, suspenseful
Tropes: amateur-detective, found-family, slice-of-life
Setting: Greenwich Village, New York, Village Blend
Period: Christmas, 21st-century
367 pages · Mass Market Paperback · Berkley
Content warnings: death, murder