Sleigh Bells and Slaughter

A Holiday Cozy Romantic Mystery

By: Alina Jacobs

Narrated by: Leah Mallach, Patrick Zeller

Slaughter, you say? Well, you’d be ready to rampage, too, if you had to listen to “Jingle Bell Rock” for the eleven thousandth time.
Christmas is bad enough without all the music, frantic shopping sprees, and holiday parties. So many parties… with people you couldn’t stand in high school and definitely can’t stand now.
Top of the list? Patty Harrison. She made my teen years miserable and, now that we’re adults, she’s trying to get me banned from the Christmas market.
Even so, I’m not going to commit literal murder.

But when Patty is found dead in the fiery inferno of my shed, I’m not going to pretend to be sad either.
Just because I look like Wednesday Addams’s cooler, more dangerous older sister, everyone assumes I did it—including Captain Luke Reynolds, the firefighter tasked with solving the mystery of the arson and murder.
He’s everything terrible about Christmas, all in one tall, huge, muscular package.

No, not like that! I have more self-respect than to drool over a man who’s convinced I’m a murderer. Too bad my only alibi is my cat, Salem, and he’s not talking.

As someone who detests Christmas and counts down the days until Halloween, I’m not inviting Luke over for milk and cookies to appeal to his protective nature and beg for help.
Nope, I’m oiling up my brass knuckles, clearing my name, then retreating to my witchy cottage to wait out the yuletide season.

But what if I end up right in the real killer’s lair?
All the better!
Christmas needs a little spooky, and what better way than solving a murder?

This is a stand-alone, hilarious holiday-romance mystery featuring a book bestie with a spooky flair, a hotshot firefighter who wants to put a little steam underneath your tree, small town drama, and a murder!

©2023 Adair Lakes LLC (P)2024 Adair Lakes LLC

Christmas Who Done It

I loved this holiday who-done-it book! It had murder, mystery, investigation, and romance. It was a really quick read/listen so this one one be a really fun pallet cleanser between longer books.
Lillith is a goth girlie, and Luke is a Christmas fanatic. They're so different they just work.
Audio quality and narration were great! I do wish it was duet narration rather than dual narration as the female narrator had a good cadence and way of speaking but the male narrator made her sound whiney and changed the sound of her voice when reading the female parts. All in all I do love Alina Jacobs and definitely recommend this book.
Story was 4.5/5 (I wish it was longer), narration 4/5, spice level 1/5 (minimal spice), Overall book was a 5/5, recommend it and would read again.

Omg

Wow! I don’t usually read mystery but I wanted to try something new and I’m definitely not disappointed. This book was everything I hadn’t known I was missing. Perfect blend of romance and mystery! I can’t wait to read the next books…

Firefighter/Wednesday Adams, mystery in small town

Firefighter/Wednesday Adams with a cat, mystery in small town, rom com, he falls fast and hard, Christmas season, and of course with Alina Jacobs' books you get hot hot HOT spice!

I read and listened to this book. I love the audio. The narrators are amazing. I love the audio as I think you connect to the characters faster because you hear more through their voices, if that makes sense. Highly recommend the audio.

This is not the first book in the series, but it can be read as a stand-alone. Everything you need to know will be given to you, you will have just met the characters before when they were secondary characters.

The cat

All right. It’s got smut. It’s got a Christmas theme. It’s got a hot fire fighter. And it has the dumbest chick I’ve ever read in a book in my life. She just reeled from one accusation to another, with absolutely crap for evidence. Seriously…. how she ever got to the truth… I think it’s possible. She only got to the truth because we were running out of characters for her to accuse.

Odd combo of cozy mystery & smutty sex

I like cozy mysteries and smutty romances- just not together in one book. For that matter, the too on-the-nose, hyperbolically bad, high school level, Mean Girls plot also clashed with the dirty talking, sex-on-the-brain, girlfriend-in-a-day romance. And, did I miss that this was a paranormal book? There’s a seance scene that also felt out of place.

The Wednesday Addams vibe sort of worked, although I was at a loss for what Luke saw in her beyond sex. Her only redeeming qualities were her baking skills and love for her cat. This ended up as a jumble of mismatched parts that didn’t really work for me.