My first (as far as I can remember) Christmas cozy! Enjoyable story. It was first published in 1991 and the story holds up. Some of the details are now nostalgic, such as the kids watching a Garfield Chrismas special on the VCR and a husband who suggests his wife take some Midol (do they still make that stuff?). Spoiler alert: the husband lives.

a nice start to what could have been a stereotypical, small town, cookies, friendly cop amateur smart lady cozy. Will be looking at another. ( )

What a great look at small-time life in down-East Maine. Leslie Meier does such a nice job of capturing everyday life, whether that’s working in a call center, everyone in a small town knowing one another, or covering childcare for your neighbors when there’s been an accident. In this first book of the Lucy Stone series, when Lucy witnesses a death outside her call center, she goes on the hunt for more clues. This book was a bit heavier on the murder and a little lighter on the mistletoe, but it was still quite the enjoyable read, and a great mystery that kept me guessing up until the end.

Please excuse typos/name misspellings. Entered on screen reader. ( )

Lucy’s life is is just one hectic day after another as Christmas is drawing ever closer. She has a part time evening job, takes care of three kids and her husband, runs the household, is getting ready for Christmas, and is expecting her mother and Bill’s parents for Christmas. That would certainly be more than enough for anyone, but the icing on the cake is Lucy finding a dead body in a parked car. This is the first novel in the series, and it’s a nice introduction to the many books that follow. My main complaint is that there are too many deaths for a cozy mystery. This includes two totally unnecessary deaths of animals. On the positive side, Lucy and her family and friends are all interesting characters. The solution of the mystery a pretty good one. And the series does improve as it goes on. ( )

As Christmas approaches, Lucy Stone is very busy at her job taking phone orders for Country Cousins, a mail-order company. Add in Christmas shopping, a visit from her mother, and the kids...well, Lucy really doesn't have time to get embroiled in a murder investigation. But, that's exactly what happens when she discovers the body of the founder of Country Cousins inside his car parked in the company parking lot. As she uncovers clues about who may have killed Sam Miller, little does she know that the killer is watching and waiting to kill those who get to close to the truth.

This book was just ok for me. The main character, Lucy, whines for the entire book about how busy she is. There is very little mystery, and a lot of complaining from her. After the first couple of chapters, I was really tired of hearing about how much she had to do. There was more discussion of her to-do list for the holidays or complaints about her job than there was about the murder mystery. It really got a bit tedious for me.

There are also some plot twists that make no sense, or add nothing to the plot. At one point, Lucy's cat is strangled. But after burying the cat, there is no more mention of who might have killed their family pet, or why the pet was strangled by someone. If someone strangled my cat and left it outside my home in the street, I would be calling the police and be very upset. But, as soon as the cat was buried, it was like nothing had happened. Then Lucy believes that someone may have hired a hitman from an advertisement in a gun magazine to kill her boss. Her idea to test that idea is to contact several of these possible professional killers to pretend that she is interested in hiring someone to kill her husband. But for the most part, they are men looking to provide sexual services rather than murders. One refuses to come to Maine in winter to kill someone. And one is a real hitman who asks for too much money. This weird tangent did nothing to further the plot. It just seemed.....stupid. I won't give any more examples as I don't want to spoil the plot for anyone.....but the mystery portion of this book really made very little sense.

I did like the bits of humor and real life that Meier added to her story, but I would have liked a bit more mystery and less discussion of how tiring it is to prepare for Christmas.

I will read another book from this series to see if this first book was just a warm-up. It might be the other books are better than this one. I would have given this book 2.5 stars if possible. Since it isn't, I bumped it up to 3. Just kinda meh for me. ( )