A Kindness Before Christmas
(2027)(The second book in the Jazz Age Christmas Mysteries series)
A novel by Sherilyn Decter
Every Friday night, the cook at the Velvet Hour leaves a crock of stew on the back step for whoever the cold sends down the alley. She has never once asked whose hands take it.
Chicago, Christmas 1928. Mrs. Birch has fed a speakeasy two flights above a Rush Street flower shop for years. She counts the coal, the geese, and the loaves, and she never counts herself. She doesn't ask questions. She doesn't need to know anyone's name.
Then, three days before Christmas, the girl who keeps the cloakroom doesn't come to work. She's taken something that belongs to a North Side moneylender, a soft-spoken man who ushers at Mass on Sundays. He wants it back before Christmas Eve.
Nobody upstairs can simply act. So the woman who never leaves her kitchen must cross a frozen city, into a tenement kitchen on the Near North Side and a beauty parlor on the South Side. She is looking for a girl she never once looked at, and she has to find her before he does. To do it, Mrs. Birch will have to do the one thing she has avoided all her life: ask.
A Kindness Before Christmas is a warm, atmospheric standalone novel of Prohibition-era Chicago, with a mystery ticking quietly underneath. It's for readers who love Hazel Gaynor and Heather Webb's Last Christmas in Paris, Anne Perry's Christmas novellas, and Karen White's The Christmas Spirits on Tradd Street.
Pull up a chair in the warm room. Scroll up and start reading today.
Genre: Historical
Chicago, Christmas 1928. Mrs. Birch has fed a speakeasy two flights above a Rush Street flower shop for years. She counts the coal, the geese, and the loaves, and she never counts herself. She doesn't ask questions. She doesn't need to know anyone's name.
Then, three days before Christmas, the girl who keeps the cloakroom doesn't come to work. She's taken something that belongs to a North Side moneylender, a soft-spoken man who ushers at Mass on Sundays. He wants it back before Christmas Eve.
Nobody upstairs can simply act. So the woman who never leaves her kitchen must cross a frozen city, into a tenement kitchen on the Near North Side and a beauty parlor on the South Side. She is looking for a girl she never once looked at, and she has to find her before he does. To do it, Mrs. Birch will have to do the one thing she has avoided all her life: ask.
A Kindness Before Christmas is a warm, atmospheric standalone novel of Prohibition-era Chicago, with a mystery ticking quietly underneath. It's for readers who love Hazel Gaynor and Heather Webb's Last Christmas in Paris, Anne Perry's Christmas novellas, and Karen White's The Christmas Spirits on Tradd Street.
Pull up a chair in the warm room. Scroll up and start reading today.
Genre: Historical