Golden Age of Detective Fiction

Today marks the halfway point in the  #20BooksOfChristmas reading challenge set by That Happy Reader. Get ready to dive into some 1990’s nostalgia with Leslie Meier’s Mistletoe Murder.

The Story

Published in 1993 and set in a fictional catalog retail store called Country Cousins, Mistletoe Murder is a delightful journey down memory lane. It brought back many childhood memories of my cousins and me pouring over Christmas catalogs, circling our desired gifts for our grandparents to order. The book beautifully captures the excitement of those moments, making me feel like I can smell the glossy pages and feel the anticipation of finding the perfect gift under the tree.

However, I never thought of the poor people taking the overload of holiday orders and craftily upselling vulnerable buyers. On the other side of the phone line, we meet saleswoman Lucy Stone.

Awash in the preppy L.L. Bean style aesthetic that had a chokehold on middle-class America in the 1990s, Lucy Stone is selling moderately priced kitchen knives, thick woolen scarves, and high-performance skis to needy shoppers while also juggling the crush of Christmas pageants, baking cookies, and making Christmas a holly-jolly good time for her husband, three children, and her newly widowed mother.

Just when you thought Lucy’s life couldn’t get any more hectic, a shocking event turns her world upside down. She discovers the founder of Country Cousins, Sam Miller, dead in an apparent suicide. This unexpected turn of events leaves Lucy with more questions than answers, prompting her to embark on her own investigation into Sam Miller’s death.

The holidays turn deadlier as Lucy braves a new kind of back catalog where people go to solicit sex and hit men when she puts an ad in the back pages of one after discovering this murder is seedier than the wholesome Lucy Stone imagined. Her amateur sleuthing catches the eye of the local police, and a dangerous killer can uncover the secrets hidden all around her seemingly blameless town and catch a killer before she becomes the next victim.

The Review

Mistletoe Murder begins as a cozy Christmas mystery. The rampant 1990s brand dropping dooked me, but the quiet charm of Lucy Stone sold me on the series. She’s a busy working mom running off three hours of sleep to make extra money for Christmas. Her life felt very realistic to me, a cycle of never-ending tasks she undertakes because her three children and husband love her and are also trying their best despite the never-ending, must-be-done-by-Christmas task list.

I find Lucy refreshingly relatable. She’s not syrupy, sweet, or too utterly twee; she is not ignored and embittered by a lazy husband and thoughtless family. She’s a nice, friendly, pleasant woman who is trying her best to support her family during the busiest season of the year—when she stumbles into a possible murder. Instead of running away, she tries to help the dying Sam Miller, and once he is dead, she’s naturally curious why someone would kill him.

Lucy Stone is driven by simple curiosity and moral anger that someone would callously kill another person, which I think is probably what motivates amateurs to investigate true crimes. There’s no higher calling driving Lucy Stone- she just doesn’t think a person should be able to kill another person. So she investigates and does so without ever becoming a gossip or a nag. Lucy Stone is an intelligent woman who observes everyday interactions, listens to gossip without malice, and takes a few funny risks in keeping with a cozy mystery before unmasking the killer.

The mystery is a little thin, with lots of the story taking its time fleshing out Lucy’s myriad of co-workers, friends, enemies, and family in the little Maine town, which I found pleasant. The mystery gets a little more juice in the story’s second half after a gruesome inciting incident.

The aforementioned inciting incident is a rather graphic killing of a cat- which somewhat soured the atmosphere of the cozy mystery, especially since it kept being mentioned repeatedly. The tonal shift took me by surprise as animal cruelty becomes a significant signature of the killer, and later, there is even a shooting of a dog, which is met with some weird reactions by the other characters. Again, this was a significant turn-off for me in a book that was otherwise beginning.

While I was initially swept away with the 1990s nostalgia, listening to this book reminded me of some things that are better left in the twentieth century- there’s an awkward subplot about Lucy Stone heartily giving cast-off clothes to people “on the wrong side of town” who all like in shacks and are bereft with mental illness and imbecility.

There’s also a rather clumsy plot thread about how Lucy Stone, a working feminist, fights off her boss with his wandering hands by threatening to sic her burly husband on him after a rather casual depiction of SA. HR apparently wasn’t a thing back then. In any case, some of the attitudes depicted in this book are better left in the 1990’s.

Mistletoe Murder piqued my interest in the Lucy Stone series, and I’ll definitely return to the series, but this first book has some obvious drawbacks. Good characters, an overload of Christmas cheer, and a fun albeit tedious mystery can’t offset some due to tonal miscues on Leslie Meier’s part, and some are just the pitfalls of writing a story so aggressively of its time

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#20BooksOfChristmas Reviews

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