Chestnuts and Mistletoe

For thirty years he never let go of his own copper mug. On the final evening of the market, he set it down for ten minutes.

It is Maggie Thistlewood's third December in Hollow Oak, and last year's little Wassail market has grown into the Twelve Doors: twelve painted stalls on the green, one door opened every evening at five, a chestnut roaster by the tree who sells out on the dot, and a blacksmith whose kissing balls hang heavy with mistletoe. The takings are for the chapel roof. The man who wants to buy it all is Victor Hale, who runs forty Christmas markets and never drinks from anything but his own lidded copper mug, because, he says, somebody always wants to put something in your drink.

On the evening of the twelfth door, in front of four hundred people, he climbs a ladder to hang the ceremonial kissing ball and leaves his mug on the counter below. Twenty minutes after the toast, he is dead of mistletoe.

The whole town remembers last Christmas, and a silver cup on a warming shelf. The whole town knows exactly what happened: a berry fell into his mug, and the blacksmith's name is already being said in a certain way. Maggie believes it too. The Chief of Police, who stood in the snow under an apple tree a year ago, is the one man in Hollow Oak who refuses to.

Maggie has a nose, a chalkboard photographed every day with the church clock behind it, a card reader that remembers every sale, a newspaper editor who never stops shooting, and a cat who is not saying anything. She also has one account of a quarter to five that cannot be true.

Chestnuts and Mistletoe is the sixth Hollow Oak Cozy Mystery: a fair-play whodunit you can solve before the reveal, a Christmas market a town decides to keep, a slow-burn romance on the road to Worcester, and a card at the end that opens the oldest question in Hollow Oak.

Each Hollow Oak mystery stands on its own. Start here, or start with Fair Tea and Foxglove.