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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9780451225481
ISBN number: 0451225481
Label: Signet
Manufacturer: Signet
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 304
Printing Date: November 04, 2008
Publishing house: Signet
Sale Popularity Level: 6293
Studio: Signet
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Product Description:
A humbug of a Shopping mystery...
From The Anthony and Agatha Award-Winning Author of Accessory to Murder
Includes insider shopping tips!
Mystery shopper Josie Marcus doesn’t get the appeal of the year-round Christmas shop. But when three such holiday houses pop up within two blocks, she’s assigned to rate them anonymously.
Easy enough, Josie thinks, until she realizes that shoppers at one store are finding a strange—even deadly—secret ingredient in their holiday cake. And Josie must get to the bottom of it all before someone else becomes a Christmas spirit.
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Rated by buyers 
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I have all of Elaine Viets mystery shopper and dead end job mysteries and I love them all. I have to say by far, this is the best of the mystery shopper series. I have noticed that more and more mystery series are going for holiday themes, i.e. Joanna Carl's The Chocolate Snowman Murders and Shirley Murphy's 2007 Cat Deck the Halls Joe Grey Mystery. I cannot speak for the Murphy mystery as I have not read it yet, but I can safely say Viets beats out Carl's Snowman Murders for the better holiday mystery.
Josie Marcus is a loveable protaganist as a single mom and amateur sleuth and the recurring cast of characters is what holds the wonderful series together. In this book, Josie is soured on Christmas because she feels that she has been looking at holiday decorations since Labor Day, but when she is ordered to mystery shop two of the three holiday stores that have cropped up or lose her job, she does what any good mystery shopper would do, sucks it up, hopes for the best and brings a witness. The second shop is owned by her current boyfriend's rather colorful ex who would be more at home in a Halloween store than a Christmas shop. The experience is exactly what Josie expects and she writes an honest report, which as expected complicates everything. Viets doesn't stop there, she adds Josie's daughter's father into the mix who has recently been released from Canadian prison, where he has been serving a sentence for drug dealing.
What I love about the book, besides that it's Christmas-y, is that even though there are several complex issues being addressed, it never gets messy that it feels like Viets forgets what she's doing and the plot never bogs down. The end of the book is wrapped up like a tidy Christmas package and leaves me waiting eagerly for the subsequent book in series, just as it should. If you're a fan of the mystery shopper series, you definitely want to add this to your collection and if you're just starting, I suggest you begin with the very first book in the series and I promise you'll be clamoring for this one.
Rated by buyers 
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Mystery shopper Josie Marcus is having problems getting into the holiday spirits. Her boyfriend Mike invested $20,000 in the mother of his daughter Heather's- year round Christmas store. Josie does not like Heather because she is nasty towards Josie's younger daughter Amelia. Naughty or Nice is not doing well because a rival shop Elsie's Elf House opened nearby and a third Christmas store is in the same tiny vicinity.
Josie has no time to worry about Mike, his investment or his cruel daughter. The father of her child Nate has just been released from a Canadian prison after a decade of incarceration for selling drugs. He threatens Josie with a custody suit and implies he could abduct their daughter. They have a shouting match that Josie's neighbor hears. When a drunken Nate comes to Josie's house with a chocolate Santa, Josie refuses to let him enter. He eats the pastry; later Josie finds him unconscious. At the hospital, a toxicologist report says he imbibed anti-freeze just like a woman who ate a the same pstry from the same place. Josie and Mike are under suspicion so she seeks proof to back up her theory as to who the killer is.
Elaine Viets writes exciting amateur sleuth mysteries filled with believable characters; the recurring cast starting with Josie adds a sense of friendship that in turn embellishes the feeling of realism. A single mom, Josie knows she must care for Amanda very first even before her desires. It is interesting how "blind" Mike is to his daughter's antipathy towards his girlfriend and her offspring. Nate is slime and in death he still causes the heroine problems. Although the whodunit is a bit light, the relationships crises add delightful trimmings to the murder investigation.
Harriet Klausner
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