PEPPERMINT BARKED

A brutal assault disrupts Christmas festivities at Seattle’s famed Pike Place Market.

Pepper Reece knows how lucky she is to have snagged a shop in her city’s iconic farmers market. Some merchants wait years for such an opportunity. To show her gratitude for her good fortune, she makes sure that Seattle Spice looks, smells, and tastes season-appropriate, with cinnamon-laden garlands and mint tea samples for customers. But it becomes much harder for her to maintain her desired level of Christmas cheer when, on a trip to fellow merchant Vinny Delgado’s wine shop, she finds his young assistant, Beth Yardley, lying in a pool of blood. Vinny’s ex-wife, Marly, is on the scene. Together the two women summon the police and wait for Vinny while gravely injured Beth is taken to the hospital. As the young woman hovers between life and death in the ICU, Pepper’s boyfriend, Nate Seward, and his brother, Bronson, clean up Vinny’s shop. Until Beth’s attacker is caught, though, the market’s merchants remain on edge. To bring peace to her beloved Pike Place, Pepper decides that she has to investigate, even without knowing whether Beth was the target of a planned attack or the victim of a random act of violence.

A standard merchant cozy with local color and holiday trimmings.