Santa Clawed by Rita Mae Brown

It's Christmas in Crozet, and Harry and the animals are enjoying the winter: decorating, planning parties and picking out Christmas trees. The Tree farm is run by a semi-Monastic community called The Brothers of Love, who both run a hospice and a tree farm during the Christmas season. Very lucrative, the tree farm is enough to recoup the expenses the hospice and the community over the rest of the year.

Harry goes to the tree farm with her animals: Cats Mrs. Murphy and Pewter, and her Welsh Corgi Dog Tee Tucker. There, she picks out a tree but wants her husband Fair's approval. She chats with the brother running the tree farm, Christopher Hewitt, a former schoolmate of hers who got into trouble in the investment business and lost a great deal of other people's money. When he finally moved back home, he joined the brotherhood to do penance and hopefully give up the love of money.

But when Harry and Phairamond return, Christopher is missing, and another brother has taken over the tree farm. Unfortunately, Harry, with the help of Tee Tucker and Mrs. Murphy, finds Brother Christopher's body dead against the base of one of the trees, his throat slit and a greek coin called an Obol under his tongue. This immediately puts Harry off buying a tree, and sets her on the path to finding the killer. But who would want to kill Christopher? Was it someone from his past, or his present?

As the police look into the Monastery, which is run by a former opera star who was found in a bed with both a man and a woman, Harry wonders if someone from Christopher's life in Arizona might be responsible. But soon another Monk, a former Jockey named Brother Speed, is found murdered in the same way as Christopher, including the Obol under the tongue, bringing attention back to the Monastery.

And when Tucker finds two men from the Monastery leaving a tool box filled with money on the mountain, he and Mrs. Murphy lead her to the money by dropping one of the bundles, a neat $10,000, right at her feet. But when Harry finds the money amd the toolbox, she is taken out- one of the monks comes back and knocks her out, leaving her there in the storm to die. But once again, the animals save her. While Mrs. Murphy curls up around Harry's head and face, keeping her warm, Tucker runs for help back to the farmhouse, leading Fair, who has just come home, to Harry's unconscious body in the midst of a driving snowstorm.

A fast trip to the hospital saves Harry's life, but can she and Fair discover who the real serial killer is, and why they are targeting men from the Monastery, before anyone else dies? And what is the motive behind the murders of the brothers? How did they come to have so much money in that toolbox, and why were they trying to hide it?

Thanks to Harry and Mrs. Murphy, I've been to the fictional town of Crozet so many times that it almost feels like home. Well, except for the hunt club, which has never been part of my life no matter where I lived, North or South. And while this is a Christmas Mystery, I am reading it after the Christmas season here. But that's okay, as it reminds me of all the good things about Christmas that I have missed.

And the mystery this time is a particularly thorny one. Though the Brothers of Love are a part of Crozet, they are very isolated by their position up a mountain, where they take care of dying patients in a hospice. But isolation from the world also means privacy to hide their doings from the rest of the world, and the Brothers talk a better game than they live. What are they doing on top of their mountain, and where and who are they amassing all this money from? Will the residents of Crozet ever be able to trust the Brothers again after all this is over.

Isolated from the world or not, sins are comitted in private, and once these sins are revealed, nothing will ever be the same in Crozet. This is an enjoyable story, and once you get over that the animals talk (but only amongst themselves, the humans don't understand animal talk, while the animals understand English), this is an extremely enjoyable murder mystery that will leave you enchanted with Harry, the animals and Crozet as well, and you'll understand what keeps drawing me back to this series.