When you live in a small town, own a business there, and date the police detective, you can expect to have some political intrigue!  Jill Gardner owns the coffee bookstore and is dating Detective Greg King but she also has a knack for solving mysteries and finding dead bodies. It’s holiday time and the town is ready for decorating but the Mayor has his own ideas about how that should be done.  A social worker decides to set store owners up with people who desperately need jobs for the training experience.  There is a lot going on which would be hard enough but top it off with the fact that the mayor is a jerk and the social worker is a big jerk.  When Jill finds the Social Worker, Ted, dead in his car the shock is great but she is determined to not let it undermine the holidays.

Cahoon has written a very enjoyable mystery romance for the holiday season.  She has developed some terrific characters that are easy to love or hate; isn’t it funny how the bigger the jerk, the less a reader feels about the death!  

The plot gets a little complicated, but that makes the mystery of whodunit even harder to solve and helps build the anticipation and puzzling over who turns out to be the bad guy. There are a lot of different aspects to this story and Cahoon does a great job of bringing everything together in a surprising way.