Book 3 of the Hollow Oak Witch Cozy Mysteries
Wassail and Hellebore
A Christmas Witch Cozy Mystery
by C.T. Lin
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About the book
It is witch Maggie Thistlewood's second Christmas in Hollow Oak, and this one brings a bell that has not rung since 1851, a man poisoned from his own wassail cup, and a talking cat who finally gives up a name.
A fair-play cozy mystery: every clue is on the page, the contradiction is stated plainly, and you can solve it before Maggie does.
Hollow Oak has invented a Midwinter Wassail to pay for the tree surgeon: a market on the green, hot spiced cider from the new inn, a lantern walk to the oldest apple tree in the county, and, at midnight on Christmas Eve, the church bell rung for the first time in a hundred and seventy-five years. The bell-hanger who has come to hang it is called Ellery. So was the family the town drove out when the bell cracked.
Then an antiques dealer arrives with a torn page from the town's 1743 Covenant, a price of nine thousand dollars, and a two-handled cup he drinks wassail from and nothing else. On the night of the lighting, the bell strikes once, the air on the green changes from orange to lemon, and Desmond Kell walks to the orchard with his cup and never walks back.
Two hundred people drank from the same bowl. Only one of them is dead. The poison was in the cup, and the cup spent forty minutes on a warming shelf by an innkeeper's fire while its owner stood behind a bolted door in a tower with a stranger the town has already decided to blame.
Maggie has a nose, a chief with a notebook, a friend with a newspaper, and a cat who has been waiting a hundred and seventy-five years for someone to come and ask him a name. And she has one contradiction, stated plainly, that only the killer needed her to believe.
Wassail and Hellebore is the third Hollow Oak Cozy Mystery: a fair-play whodunit you can solve before the reveal, a Christmas that closes an old account, a slow-burn romance that finally gets its answer under an oak at midnight, and a talking cat who is, for once, in a good mood.
Each Hollow Oak mystery stands on its own. Start here, or start with Fair Tea and Foxglove.