Katherine Hall Page, Body in the Sleigh

Faith Fairchild and her family spend Christmas together at their cottage on Sanpere Island in Penobscot Bay, Maine. At a local store, Faith finds the corpse of a teen named Norah in an antique sleigh. She assumes the young girl died from an overdose as there are no visible marks on the girl, but the police suspect her boyfriend is her killer.

On Christmas Eve goat farmer Mary Bethany calls Faith asking for help. Mary explains she has found a newborn boy with an enigmatic note and $50,000 inside her barn. While her husband the Reverend recovers from gallstone removal surgery, Faith searches for the biological mother. She locates college student Miriam whose boyfriend is a dealer. The amateur sleuth and the mom are in trouble from those who want both dead.

This is an exciting Christmas mystery as Faith and her family celebrates the holiday season together by her investigating the homicide and the baby abandonment while her spouse recovers from surgery with good cheer from the brood especially the children. The story line is fast-paced with two underlying messages of the lucrative drug trafficking is everywhere as the economics supersedes the law and the ethics, and the Fairchild family wishing everyone a happy holiday season with recipes and good cheer to all.

Harriet Klausner