Holiday Grind — Cleo Coyle

When Village Blend manager and head barista Clare Cosi finds a red-suited body in the snow, she adds solving Santa's slaying to her coffeehouse menu.

Clare's grown very fond of Alfred Glockner, the part-time comic and genuinely jolly charity Santa who's been using her coffeehouse as a place to warm his mittens. When she finds him gunned down in a nearby alley, a few subtle clues convince her that Alfred's death was something more than the tragic result of a random mugging -- the conclusion of the police.

With Clare's boyfriend, NYPD detective Mike Quinn, distracted by a cold case of his own, and ex-husband Matt "investigating" this year's holiday lingerie catalogs (an annual event), Clare charges ahead solo and discovers this Santa had a list that he was checking twice -- and the folks on it were not very nice. Then someone tries to ice Clare, and she really gets steamed...