Both seasons of Mistletoe Murders are coming to Netflix in the United States on November 1, just four days before Season 3 premieres on Hallmark Channel. And really, I couldn’t have asked for a better excuse to talk about a series I’ve grown very fond of.
My couple of rewatches are finally coming in handy.
I know Hallmark Christmas movies can sometimes come with a certain expectation of cheesiness, but Mistletoe Murders is a little different. The crime and mystery are very much at the center of the series. It just happens that our amateur detective, Emily Lane, owns a Christmas shop that stays open all year in a town that looks made for the holidays. You get murder mysteries, Christmas everywhere you look, and a romance that starts building in Season 1 before becoming an even bigger part of the story in Season 2.
For anyone discovering the series through Netflix, there is one other thing worth knowing about the episode structure. Season 1 has six episodes, but it really tells three mysteries, with each case divided into two parts: Poison in a Pear Tree, Peril of the Belles, and Death of a Humbug. So instead of recapping them as six separate stories, this Mistletoe Murders Season 1 recap combines each two-parter into one complete case.
Mistletoe Murders Started as an Audible Original
Before Sarah Drew became Emily Lane, Mistletoe Murders was an Audible Original created by Ken Cuperus.
The audio series launched in 2022 with Cobie Smulders as Emily, Raymond Ablack as Sam and Anna Cathcart as Violet. Interestingly, Cuperus originally came up with the idea for television. His wife and producing partner Michelle Melanson pitched it to Audible, which was looking for mystery and thriller programming, and the audio version became the first produced incarnation of the story.
The format should sound very familiar to anyone who has watched the Hallmark adaptation. The Audible episodes run for around 30 minutes, with two episodes making up one complete murder mystery and a cliffhanger separating the two halves.
After the audio series found an audience, Hallmark worked with Cuperus, Melanson and Lionsgate Canada to bring it to television. Cuperus also writes the TV adaptation, but the two versions aren’t identical. Even the murderer in the first television season was changed so listeners wouldn’t already know the answer.
That means you can listen to the original after watching the Hallmark series without simply getting the exact same mysteries all over again.
Poison in a Pear Tree Parts 1 & 2 Recap: Who Killed Marcus?
Emily Lane has made a quiet new life for herself in Fletcher’s Grove, where she owns the year-round Christmas store Under the Mistletoe. She is friendly enough to fit into town, but getting genuinely close to people is another matter. Nightmares involving a mysterious symbol and a building exploding suggest there is a lot about her life before Fletcher’s Grove that she doesn’t want anyone discovering.
Her friend and veterinarian June Hubble has much happier news. She and her ex-husband Marcus have reconciled and plan to marry again in May.
During a horse-drawn wagon ride at the local Christmas tree farm, June gives Marcus one of the cookies Emily brought her earlier that day. Marcus later leaves to take care of some business, promising June that it is connected to a surprise. By the following morning, he is dead.
Detective Sam Wilner arrives at Emily’s shop because a cookie wrapper was found near Marcus’s body. Sam also happens to be the father of Violet, Emily’s employee, so Emily isn’t exactly a stranger to him before she starts making his investigation considerably more complicated.
Marcus was poisoned with Pentobarbital, a drug that can be found in veterinary offices. The evidence soon turns toward June, and police find traces of the poison before arresting her. Emily is convinced they have the wrong person.
She starts looking at Marcus’s life herself and quickly finds several people with reasons to hide what they were doing on the night he died. Marcus had previously dated Lizzy Klein, who is pregnant. Gordon, the owner of the Christmas tree farm, had been trying to sell the property. Then there is Trent Hadley, Marcus’s colleague at the bank, who secretly attended the wagon ride using the name Joey Vaughn.
Emily takes her investigation much further than Sam would like. She even sneaks into Marcus’s house, where she finds an ultrasound picture, a USB drive containing financial documents and paperwork connected to the proposed sale of the Christmas tree farm.
Trent eventually turns out to be Lizzy’s boyfriend and the father of her baby. His fake name has a simpler explanation too: he went to the farm because he suspected something was happening between Lizzy and Marcus. Then Gordon is poisoned.
He survives, but the second attack changes the case. Gordon had accumulated around $30,000 in gambling debt and somehow found the money to pay it. Marcus, meanwhile, withdrew $40,000 shortly before his death.
The missing money finally starts making sense when Lizzy tells Emily she was being blackmailed. Someone threatened to tell Trent that Marcus was the father of her baby unless she paid $40,000. Marcus agreed to help her and left the money behind the stables near a tree marked with a bow.
Lizzy was also with Marcus that night. After he dropped off the money, they shared the cookie June had given him, meaning the cookie itself wasn’t what killed Marcus.
Anna, Gordon’s daughter, is responsible for the blackmail. She overheard Marcus and Lizzy talking about the pregnancy and saw a way to get the money her father desperately needed. She admits what she did, but she didn’t poison Marcus.
Rowan Was Trying to Kill Gordon, Not Marcus
The real answer comes when Emily finds Pentobarbital in Rowan’s backpack at the farm.
Rowan catches her before she can get away and ties her up alongside Anna. He stole the drug from June’s bag and put it in Gordon’s flask because Gordon had backed out of a deal with him. Marcus wasn’t Rowan’s intended victim. He drank from the poisoned flask first and died because of it.
Rowan intends to make it appear that Emily exposed Anna’s blackmail and Anna retaliated by poisoning her. Emily buys herself time by convincing him she recorded his confession. When he searches for her phone, she signals Anna, who startles the horse Shadow. Rowan is knocked unconscious, giving Emily the chance to free them both.
June is cleared, Gordon begins to recover, and Lizzy and Trent reconcile.
Emily joins June, Sam and Violet for Christmas karaoke afterward. She may have come to Fletcher’s Grove determined to keep people at a distance, but she is already finding that increasingly difficult.
The case also leaves us with another piece of Emily’s larger mystery. A strange black box arrives for her, and unlike most reminders of her past, this one makes her smile.
Peril of the Belles Parts 1 & 2 Recap: What Happened to Clara and Adam?
The second mystery begins with what initially looks like a freak accident. A Christmas decoration falls from a rooftop and nearly kills Debbie Hannigan, a member of the local choir known as The Belles. Emily doesn’t buy the accident explanation.
She learns that another member of the choir, Clara Jameson, recently died in a hit-and-run. Both Clara and Debbie were lead singers, which is enough to make Emily curious about what is happening inside the group.
Her solution is exactly what you would expect from Emily at this point: join the choir herself.
She auditions with “Silent Night” and becomes the newest Belle, giving her the perfect opportunity to look around. Clara had been a vocal coach and was apparently planning to leave the choir before her death. There was also plenty of jealousy inside the group, particularly around who got to sing the solos.
Clara’s husband, Adam, has his own theory. When Emily engineers an excuse to speak with him, he flatly accuses The Belles of killing his wife.
Emily doesn’t know whether that is grief talking or whether Adam has discovered something real. Her suspicions grow when Debbie suffers another attack. Someone tampers with her throat spray by adding bee pollen, triggering a severe allergic reaction, and her EpiPen is nowhere to be found.
This time, even Sam has to concede that the incidents surrounding Debbie aren’t simply bad luck.
Adam remains convinced Clara’s death is connected to the choir. He also believed his wife may have been having an affair, and his suspicions fell on Vance, another member of The Belles. Vance has a criminal past, but Emily eventually learns that his meetings with Clara were innocent. She was teaching him how to read music. Then Adam disappears.
His truck is found abandoned with blood on the steering wheel, and the search for him becomes much more urgent.
At the same time, Emily has a problem much closer to home. Someone breaks into Under the Mistletoe using the key Violet lost. Emily eventually identifies the intruder as Pete, the brother of Violet’s friend Nicki. The break-in isn’t connected to the murders, but the way Emily handles Pete gives another small glimpse of skills that don’t quite fit the life she claims to have lived.
The real break in Adam’s disappearance comes from the investigation he was conducting himself.
Adam had been checking junkyards for the car that killed Clara. Sue tells Emily that Clara once gave lessons in a trailer at her home, where several vehicles are still sitting outside. Emily searches the property, notices the smell of bleach beneath a tarp and opens the trunk of one of the cars: Adam’s body is inside.
The same car contains Clara’s blood and hair and previously belonged to Debbie. Someone has recently tried to clean it. Adam was killed by blunt-force trauma, but he also had a large amount of sleeping medication in his system.
Emily cuts her hand while searching the vehicle. That small injury becomes important when she remembers seeing a similar cut on Vera’s hand.
Why Did Vera Kill Adam?
When Sam and Emily confront Vera, the matching injury helps break the case open.
Vera admits she killed Adam. After he discovered the car connected to Clara’s death, she drugged him so she could clean her fingerprints from it. Adam later appeared while injured, and Vera panicked and struck him with a tire iron, killing him. But Vera isn’t responsible for everything that has happened to Debbie.
Adam poisoned Debbie’s throat spray with bee pollen. Convinced she was responsible for Clara’s death, he had started taking revenge into his own hands. And he wasn’t finished.
Emily realizes an electrical diagram found among Adam’s things is a plan to electrocute Debbie during The Belles’ performance. The problem is that Debbie is no longer singing the solo, Brooke is.
Emily reaches the concert in time and saves her before Adam’s plan can claim another victim.
With the case over, the relationship between Emily and Sam moves forward too. He asks why Christmas means so much to her, and Emily gives him a rare piece of the truth. Her parents died in a car accident, and her last happy memories with them are tied to Christmas. She has spent years trying to recapture that feeling, but Fletcher’s Grove is starting to give her something she hasn’t had in a long time.
They embrace, but Emily’s past isn’t staying buried. When she gets home, a message is waiting on her computer: “I know you are there, and I will find you.”
Death of a Humbug Parts 1 & 2 Recap: Who Killed Glenn?
By the final mystery, Emily is no longer quite the outsider we met at the beginning of the season. She even attends a Christmas party at the diner, where bookstore owner Glenn Shaw arrives dressed as Santa and hands out books as gifts.
Sue isn’t particularly happy to see him. Glenn has been banned from the diner for years, although she insists the reason is nothing more dramatic than his habit of sending food back.
Before the night is over, Glenn is found stabbed in the kitchen.
Emily saw someone she believed was Glenn leaving in the Santa suit shortly before the body was discovered. She also noticed a suspicious vehicle outside.
Then Glenn’s Christmas gift gives her another reason to become involved.
The book he gave Emily contains an invitation to a special event. Sam goes with her, and they find Brooke, Glenn’s nephew Fred, Morgan, and a man named Harvey waiting there. Glenn’s lawyer, Talia, plays a video he recorded before his death.
Glenn knew he was dying, and he left behind an elaborate A Christmas Carol-inspired scavenger hunt with a valuable prize waiting at the end.
A murder investigation with a Christmas literary puzzle attached to it is pretty much irresistible to Emily.
The books Glenn distributed contain hidden words visible under UV light. Solving them becomes a group effort, even as suspicion moves among the people Glenn invited.
There is plenty happening outside the game too. Someone breaks into Talia’s office and steals the USB drive containing Glenn’s video. Sam secretly keeps looking into Emily’s background. And someone else is watching her, with surveillance photographs showing that whatever Emily fears from her old life is getting closer.
Fred’s estranged brother Noah suddenly reappears after an 18-year absence. He admits breaking into Talia’s office and taking the USB drive, but his return also adds another piece to Glenn’s plan. Noah received his own invitation and key, and he saw someone in the Santa suit leaving the diner on the night of the murder.
Before Emily can sort through everything, the danger becomes personal; a mysterious SUV nearly runs her down.
She escapes with a fractured wrist and tells Sam she simply slipped on the ice. Emily isn’t sure whether the attack is connected to Glenn’s murder or the people she has been hiding from.
The Santa suit produces another suspect when Morgan’s DNA is found on it. She admits she followed Glenn because she was angry that he planned to sell rare first-edition books without Fred’s consent. She found Glenn after he had already been stabbed. His blood got on her, and in a panic, she put on the Santa suit and fled.
Morgan’s story explains what Emily saw leaving the diner, but it doesn’t explain who stabbed Glenn.
What Was Glenn’s Scavenger Hunt Really About?
The biggest misconception about Glenn’s game is that he somehow knew he was going to be murdered; he didn’t.
Emily, Sam, Fred, and Noah discover a hidden room behind a bookcase containing a packed bag and a one-way ticket to Switzerland. Glenn was dying from Huntington’s disease and had been preparing to travel there to end his life. His videos and scavenger hunt were part of the farewell he planned for the people around him, not a prediction that someone would kill him first.
The hunt continues through GPS coordinates hidden in page numbers and clues tied to Glenn’s memories. Then Harvey disappears with the books.
Emily suspects he is also responsible for the SUV that nearly hit her and for secretly listening to conversations inside her shop. She contacts him herself and arranges to meet at the cemetery where the final clue leads.
“Harvey” isn’t Harvey at all. His real name is Sawyer, and the harmless older man persona was a disguise. Emily confronts him about Glenn’s death, and the truth finally comes out.
Sawyer approached Glenn in the bookstore stockroom looking for a valuable first edition. Glenn knew he was already dying and wasn’t intimidated by him. Sawyer killed him, took the book, and then used the invitation Sue had discarded to insert himself into Glenn’s scavenger hunt.
When Sawyer attacks Emily with a dagger, her fractured-wrist cast blocks the blade. She fights back, knocks him unconscious, and ties him up until he can be taken into custody. But Sawyer is only half the answer.
Talia Hired Sawyer to Steal Glenn’s Book
Emily realizes Glenn’s lawyer, Talia, is behind the theft.
Talia knew Glenn was dying and that he had been selling valuable books to finance his final trip. She also knew about the scavenger hunt because she had opened an invitation and resealed it, leaving behind a different wax seal.
She hired Sawyer to steal the valuable first edition for her. The plan was supposed to be a theft, but Sawyer killed Glenn in the process. Police arrive as Emily finishes confronting Talia.
Glenn’s final gift turns out to be much more personal than a valuable book.
He leaves Fred and Noah the bookstore and its collection, including the first edition of A Christmas Carol. More importantly, his game brings the estranged brothers back into each other’s lives.
And with the murder solved, Season 1 finally has time to deal with the relationship it has been building from the beginning.
Mistletoe Murders Season 1 Ending Explained: Do Emily and Sam Kiss?
Yes, and after six episodes of watching these two circle each other, Season 1 finally gets there.
On Christmas Eve, Emily hears someone downstairs at Under the Mistletoe and discovers Sam fixing the hole in her wall. Emily admits that she has been afraid of making herself vulnerable, and the two finally stop dancing around their feelings and kiss.
It’s a lovely payoff, but Mistletoe Murders gives them approximately five minutes to enjoy it.
Emily goes to get her coat so they can take a walk in the snow. While she is gone, Sam receives a phone call. Whatever he learns changes everything.
When Emily comes back, Sam is visibly upset and starts questioning the story she has told him about her background.
Then he asks the question Season 1 has been building toward from its opening episode: “Who are you, really?” The season does not answer him.
What Do We Know About Emily’s Past at the End of Season 1?
We know more than Sam does, but nowhere near enough to have the complete story.
Throughout Season 1, Emily has nightmares and memories connected to a building explosion and a mysterious figure or organization called Chimera . She has technical and investigative abilities that don’t match the ordinary background she presents to the people in Fletcher’s Grove. She uses the dark web, keeps specialized equipment hidden away, and is actively searching for Chimera while trying to make herself difficult to find.
Someone eventually finds her anyway.
The threatening message after the second mystery and the surveillance surrounding her during the third make it clear that Emily’s past is no longer safely separated from her new life. Season 1 does not give us the truth about who Emily used to be, exactly what happened before she arrived in Fletcher’s Grove, or what Sam learns during that final phone call.
Those questions are deliberately left for Season 2.
And that’s probably my favorite part of what Mistletoe Murders does with its first season. Each pair of episodes gives us a murder that can be solved and put away, while Emily herself remains the mystery running underneath all three cases.
The murders got me into the series. Emily and Sam certainly helped keep me there. And with both seasons arriving on Netflix right before Season 3 begins, this is a very good time to discover Fletcher’s Grove if you haven’t already.
