Grave Apparel

Sweatergate, a deadly assault with a giant candy cane, and a chance encounter with a homeless child in a stolen shepherd’s robe send Lacey Smithsonian on an unlikely Christmas quest in Grave Apparel, the fifth book in Ellen Byerrum’s Crime of Fashion Mysteries.

Christmas time in Washington, D.C. is a magical, glittering time of year in Our Nation’s Capital, filled with lights, seasonal concerts, and parties. But this Christmas, fashion reporter Smithsonian is caught up in “Sweatergate,” a tragicomic clash over garish holiday sweaters; the paper’s food editor, Felicity Pickles, is unexpectedly not baking her usual seasonal treats for the whole office; everyone seems to be mad at everyone else; and Lacey is getting all the blame. She’s being accused far and wide of ruining Christmas! So when the staff pain-in-the-neck is brutally assaulted in the alley behind the office with a giant candy cane and later found wrapped in a hideous Christmas sweater, it falls to Lacey to solve the crime.

The Little Shepherd offers Lacey a window into the tragic flip side to the holiday season: no room at the inn for the cold, the hungry, and the homeless. Enlisting the help of everyone from her beau Vic Donovan to her curmudgeonly editor Douglas MacArthur Jones, Smithsonian searches the snowy alleys of D.C. on a rescue mission to keep a killer from ruining Christmas.