The clerk at the Candlelight Inn has only one room left, and she has already checked the two guests in as husband and wife. It turns out to be the bridal suite. There is a Jacuzzi shaped like a heart, a pair of towels folded into swans, a mirror over the tub, mistletoe pinned to the ceiling and a bed that vibrates if someone feeds it quarters. Holly Frost takes one look and spends the night curled up in the dry Jacuzzi with a pillow, rather than share the mattress with the colleague she slept with a year ago and has not spoken to since. Home for the Homicides by Elle Cosimano, written with the crime novelist Hannah Morrissey, has a corpse in its first chapter, but this is the scene that tells a reader what sort of night they are in for.
A Town That Gasps at Four-Letter Words
The town is called Christmas, and it means it. The sheriff is Jack, the deputies are Spruce and Douglas, and the mayor is Carol Yulesky. The suspects include a basement-dwelling metal singer named Buddy Thelf and a tree farmer called Frank N. Sands, and the dead woman was dating under the name Anna_Olaf. Every name is a pun, and the book never apologises for one of them.
Holly, a state investigator from the Big City, swears roughly as often as she breathes. Christmas does not. When she drops an f-bomb in the café, the room falls silent and a mother covers her child’s ears, while the locals vent their own frustrations with oaths borrowed from the toy box and the bakery. It is a joke the novel returns to dozens of times, and somehow it keeps working, because it is really a joke about an outsider who cannot make herself fit. In Home for the Homicides by Elle Cosimano, the cosy town is not a refuge. It is a stage set, and the cracks in it are where the story lives.
The Grief Under the Glitter
What keeps the farce from floating away is Holly herself. She lost both parents on a Christmas Eve when she was thirteen, spent a year in foster care, and was adopted the following Christmas by Barb and Barry Blumenthal, a warm, meddling Jewish couple who have spent every December since trying to restore her faith in the holiday. Barb’s voicemails, her undercooked cookies and her plan for a deep-fried turducken are some of the funniest lines in the book, and one of them, replayed alone in a hotel room over a slice of themed pizza, is among its most affecting.
Her partner, Mark Shepherd, has his own reasons to dread the season, since he grew up in Christmas and left it a decade ago without a backward glance. The pair have a history the novel releases in small, embarrassing pieces, and their bickering slides toward tenderness over a stakeout on a rooftop full of humming inflatable elves. The romance is explicit and unhurried, and it is the backbone of Home for the Homicides by Elle Cosimano rather than a garnish. Neither lead is especially likeable at the start, which is part of the pleasure: the novel lets them be petty, competitive and wrong about each other, and the warmth arrives only after it has been earned through a series of humiliations.
Home for the Homicides Keeps Its Promises
For all its mischief, the novel is a proper whodunit. The victim arrives without a name, the town has no security cameras, and the evidence accumulates through interviews that are funnier than they have any right to be: a male revue at a former firehouse, a barista whose pastries carry an unprintable brand name, a sex shop where the clerk flirts with the wrong agent. Clues are planted early and honestly. When the answer arrives, it has been sitting in plain view for a long time, and a reader who rereads the early chapters of Home for the Homicides by Elle Cosimano will find the signposts there, disguised as jokes.
The omniscient narrator, an exile from Santa’s staff, interrupts sparingly to name each trope as it appears. It works more often than not, though there is something slightly too convenient about a book mocking the clichés it then cheerfully commits.
Mother Knows Worst
The best extended sequence in Home for the Homicides by Elle Cosimano is a Christmas Eve dinner at the mayor’s mansion, a house Holly decides looks exactly like the one from Home Alone. A doorman hands out cocoa through the car window. Guests must leave their guns in a crystal punch bowl. The mayor drinks something that is clearly not the kombucha she claims, her much younger husband cannot stop oversharing, and Mark’s ex-fiancée is seated in exactly the wrong chair. It runs for several chapters, and by the end the dinner has done more for the case than a week of police work.
That same set piece also exposes the book’s habit of leaning on its supporting players for single, repeated jokes. The mayor’s husband is told to be quiet so often that it becomes a refrain, and several townsfolk exist mainly to deliver one punchline apiece.
Elle Cosimano and Hannah Morrissey Push Their Luck
The collaboration mostly shows in the tonal range. Readers of Cosimano’s comic crime will recognise the escalating disasters, while Morrissey’s background in grimmer fiction lends the violence a real edge when it comes, including one attack in a hotel car park that lands like a slap. Not everything holds, though:
- Holly keeps a key email thread to herself for days, and the secrecy feels engineered to produce a quarrel rather than earned by her character.
- Mark’s running commentary through her earpiece during an undercover date is meant to be obnoxious and succeeds a little too well.
- The sexual innuendo is constant. There is hardly a page without a double meaning, and some readers will tire of it long before the festival begins.
None of these sink Home for the Homicides by Elle Cosimano, but together they explain why a sharp comedy occasionally feels longer than it is.
Final Thoughts
This is not a cosy mystery, whatever the cover suggests. Frank sex, relentless swearing, grief, and violence played mostly for laughs make it a book for adults who like their holiday reading with a splash of something stronger. Those who do will find a well-built puzzle, two leads with genuine heat between them, and the opening of what the authors clearly intend as a series. Fans of Cosimano’s Finlay Donovan Knocks ‘Em Dead will be on familiar ground, and anyone who enjoyed the gleeful bad behaviour of Hot Girl Murder Club by Ashley Winstead should add it to the list. Viewers who still quote A Christmas Story every December will catch more than one tribute.
The last free room at the Candlelight Inn was a joke about forced proximity. By the end of Home for the Homicides by Elle Cosimano, the joke has become the whole design, and the town that swore it had no crime has a great deal to answer for.