Home for the Homicides

Before any detective arrives, a narrator clears its throat. It is a disgraced employee of the North Pole, exiled after an unspecified incident to keep watch over a town so sugary it could be the set of a cable Christmas film, and it opens by reciting the checklist: the Big City woman, the flannel-shirted local, the baking montage, the room with only one bed, the kiss under the mistletoe. Then it pans across Main Street to the nativity, where a red-haired woman sits against the manger with a glass icicle ornament in her neck. Home for the Homicides by Elle Cosimano, co-written with Hannah Morrissey, tells you in three pages exactly which genre it is going to dismantle, and then does it with a straight face and a filthy mouth.

How It Works

The town is called Christmas. Crime never happens there, everyone says so, and its economy depends on the Jingle Bell Jubilee, which is twelve days away. The sheriff has never worked a homicide, so the state sends two agents from the Big City.

Holly Frost is the bureau’s best profiler, currently exiled to Mail Fraud after eating a plate of cannabis brownies left out on a porch and spending six hours high on body camera. Mark Shepherd is the Major Crimes golden boy who went viral as Special Agent Pole-Licker after a triple-dog dare froze his tongue to a lamppost. A year ago they had a memorable encounter in a supply closet at the office party, then he got the promotion she wanted and she stood him up for dinner. Their commander pairs them as punishment and adds a twist: only one Major Crimes post exists, and it goes to whoever impresses more on this case.

Chapters alternate between Holly and Mark in present tense, grouped under day banners that count down to the festival, and the narrator drops in every few pages with a one-line aside, usually calling a cliché a beat before the characters walk into it. The victim has no ID, and for its opening stretch Home for the Homicides by Elle Cosimano treats that blank as the central problem. What she does have is a dating profile, and once a thirteen-year-old cousin with a laptop cracks it, her three local matches become the suspect pool.

Home for the Homicides Plays the Trope Card Straight

The clever move is that the comedy and the investigation are the same machine. Every holiday-movie convention the narrator mocks turns out to be load-bearing. The hotel has only one room left, so the partners share it. Mark is secretly a local, which means every bartender, coroner and shopkeeper greets him with a welcome home, and the town’s habit of matchmaking visitors with residents is a motive hiding in plain sight. The morgue, in a 1903 hospital, has twenty-four drawers that the Santa-faced medical examiner calls his advent calendar, and the spare ones hold coffee pods.

Home for the Homicides by Elle Cosimano also plays fair. A selfie taken in a parked car shows a woodpile and a red-handled axe in the background, and that detail pays off later in a scene that genuinely startles. The ring found in the snow, the victim’s hidden photo folder and an alibi that runs four hours short all point somewhere, and the solution, when it comes, rearranges evidence you have already seen.

What Home for the Homicides Gets Right

• The parody never winks too hard. The narrator is rationed. It gets a line, sometimes two, and then the scene carries on, which keeps the device funny across three hundred pages.
• The rivalry has stakes. Because only one of them can win the job, every shared clue is also a small betrayal, and the book uses that tension well in the middle act.
• There is real feeling under the jokes. Holly hates the season for a reason, and Mark’s return home exposes a family that has always preferred his brother. Both threads land quietly.
• The set pieces escalate. A wired-up undercover date goes wrong in spectacular fashion, a stakeout on a toy-shop roof turns confessional, and the climax is as tense as it is absurd.

Where It Gives Ground

The weaknesses in Home for the Homicides by Elle Cosimano are mostly the price of its strengths, but they are real.

• The mystery takes its time to start. For the first quarter the romance and the town tour dominate, and by day four the investigation has a ring, an alias and not much else.
• The supporting cast are cartoons. The mayor’s young husband, the two deputies and the hotel staff exist for one joke each, and the joke is told repeatedly.
• Some gags wear thin. The locals stammering over the word murder and the endless welcome home routine are funny the first five times.
• Procedure is optional. A car is opened without a warrant, a room key is traded for gossip about the sheriff’s underwear, and a key witness is interviewed by a lead who is wearing the victim’s dress. That is the point, but it strains belief.

Read These Next

This is the first Holly & Mark Mystery, and no second title is named yet. Elle Cosimano is best known for the Finlay Donovan series, all reviewed here: Finlay Donovan Is Killing It, Knocks ‘Em Dead, Jumps the Gun, Rolls the Dice, Digs Her Own Grave and Crosses the Line. Her debut, Finlay Donovan Is Killing It, was a People pick and one of the New York Public Library’s best books of 2021, and she also writes YA, including Nearly Gone. Hannah Morrissey, a USA Today bestseller, writes the darker Black Harbor crime novels, beginning with Hello, Transcriber and continuing through The Widowmaker, When I’m Dead and The Unlucky Ones. If Home for the Homicides by Elle Cosimano is your kind of mischief, try these:

1. Finlay Donovan Is Killing It by Elle Cosimano, for the same comic timing applied to a struggling novelist mistaken for a hitwoman.
2. The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year by Ally Carter, for a snowbound holiday whodunit with a romance braided through it.
3. Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret by Benjamin Stevenson, for a narrator who talks to the reader and plays fair with the clues.
4. The Mistletoe Mystery by Nita Prose, the gentle, clean counterpoint for readers who want the season without the swearing.
5. Visions of Sugar Plums by Janet Evanovich, for holiday chaos with a bounty hunter in the middle of it.

What Stays With You

The jokes are the headline, and a lot of them are very funny, but what lingers from Home for the Homicides by Elle Cosimano is how well the two authors balance tone. Cosimano’s comic rhythm and Morrissey’s crime instincts produce a book that can stage a murder, a farce and a love story in the same chapter without dropping any of them. It is too crude for some readers and a little slow to get going, and the side characters never become people. But as a send-up of the holiday TV movie it is merciless, and as a puzzle it holds.

By the final pages, the narrator gets to run its checklist one more time, and every box has been ticked in a way no network would ever air. That is the trick of Home for the Homicides by Elle Cosimano: it gives you the whole formula and leaves a body under the tree.