Nothing lights up a Christmas party like finding a corpse in the ladies' room, and Jolie Wyatt has the dubious honor of stumbling over the dead woman in Barbara Burnett Smith's"Mistletoe from Purple Sage". Fred Hunter's Chicago detective, Jeremy Ransom, and his unofficial partner, the seventy-something Emily Charters, discover a cozy bed-and-breakfast harbors an unsolved murder in "Ransom for a Holiday". And Walter Satterthwait presents readers with an original short story featuring Joshua Craft.