The Inn at Holiday Bay: Christmas in the Candlelight

A heartwarming cozy mystery series about losing everything, taking a chance, and starting again.

After suffering a personal tragedy, Abby Sullivan buys a huge old seaside mansion she has never even seen, packs up her life in San Francisco, and moves to Holiday Bay Maine, where she is adopted, quite against her will, by a huge Maine Coon Cat named Rufus, a drifter with her own tragic past named Georgia, and a giant dog with an inferiority complex named Ramos. What Abby thought she needed was alone time to heal. What she ended up with was, an inn she never knew she wanted, a cat she couldn’t seem to convince to leave, and a new family she’d never be able to live without.

In book 25 in the series, it’s Christmas in Holiday Bay and the whole town has pitched in to make it the best one yet. The inn is booked solid for the entire month between Thanksgiving and Christmas which means that Abby and her staff are working long hours to deliver the old fashion seaside Christmas they promised. As can be expected, there are a few glitches along the way but overall things seem to be right on schedule until a storm blows in, the lights go out, and one of the guests ends up dead.

C Lynn P
4.0 out of 5 stars. 
Good plot, some of my favorite characters.
Reviewed in the United States on January 7, 2024.

I buy almost every one of Kathi's books and I pre-order the books that are from a series I have already read so that I get them right away. This book was good but not great. I can't explain it but for a Christmas book it did not have very much cheer. I thought the mystery was entertaining, but the interaction between my favorite main characters was flat. And in past books there has been a lot of holiday details about fun times and traditions, but this one seemed to have those parts just added as an after thought. I also noticed that as the books get more expensive they seem to be shorter. I am looking forward to the next book in the series and I truly hope it is longer and has more Holiday detail in it.