Winter Holidays

Harry and her husband, Fair, have gone to fetch a Christmas tree at the tree farm run by The Brothers of Love, a semimonastic organization that tends to AIDS patients, when they find the tree they've chosen grimly decorated with a dead body. Can Harry, the sleuthing cats Mrs. Murphy and Pewter, and corgi Tee Tucker save the season from a killjoy who's decided to gift the festive little town of Crozet, Virginia, with murder?

Sharpe's Christmas: Richard Sharpe, commanding the Prince of Wales' Own Volunteers, finds himself in a high, hard place with an enemy brigade on one side and a desperate force of Frenchmen fleeing their defeat in Spain on the other. Common sense suggests that he must avoid a fight, but it is Christmastime, and miracles are supposed to happen at the dark heart of the years, and so Sharpe makes a stand, and in doing so ends up giving the enemy an unexpected...

Imagine a year without Christmas. No crowded malls, no corny office parties, no fruitcakes, no unwanted presents. That's just what Luther and Nora Krank have in mind when they decide that, just this once, they'll skip the holiday altogether. Theirs will be the only house on Hemlock Street without a rooftop Frosty; they won't be hosting their annual Christmas Eve bash; they aren't even going to have a tree. They won't need one, because come December...

Carrie Slayton, a big-city society-page columnist, longs to write more serious news stories. So her editor hands her a challenge: She can cover any topic she wants, but only if she first scores the paper an interview with Finn Dalton, the notoriously reclusive author. Living in the remote Alaskan wilderness, Finn has written a mega bestselling memoir about surviving in the wild. But he stubbornly declines to speak to anyone in the press, and no one...

'Twas the night (okay, more like the week) before Christmas, and all through the tiny community of Pine Cove, California, people are busy buying, wrapping, packing, and generally getting into the holiday spirit. But not everybody is feeling the joy. Little Joshua Barker is in desperate need of a holiday miracle. No, he's not on his deathbed; no, his dog hasn't run away from home. But Josh is sure that he saw Santa take a shovel to the head, and now...

Friendly and bubbly, Julia Padden likes nearly everyone, but her standoffish neighbor, Cain Maddox, presents a particular challenge. No matter how hard she's tried to be nice, Cain rudely rebuffs her at every turn, preferring to keep to himself. But when Julia catches Cain stealing her newspaper from the lobby of their apartment building, that's the last straw. She's going to break through Cain's Scrooge-like exterior the only way she knows how: by...

Kelley Quinn is the owner of Nantucket's Winter Street Inn and the proud father of four, all of them grown and living in varying states of disarray. Patrick, the eldest, is a hedge fund manager with a guilty conscience. Kevin, a bartender, is secretly sleeping with a French housekeeper named Isabelle. Ava, a school teacher, is finally dating the perfect guy but can't get him to commit. And Bart, the youngest and only child of Kelley's second marriage...