A Kindness Before Christmas

Kindness can be a dangerous thing…

Chicago, December 1928. Up the back stair from an alley off Rush Street, the kitchen of the Velvet Hour runs the way Mrs. Birch runs everything. The coal is laid in before the cold, the geese are promised, the oysters are counted, and every Friday night a crock of stew goes out on the alley step for whoever the cold walks to the door.

She has cooked for the Velvet Hour since the night it opened. She doesn’t ask whose hands take the crock. She has never once asked the cloakroom girl her name.

Then, three days before Christmas, the cloakroom girl doesn’t come in.

Her hook is empty. Her stool is cold. And a soft-spoken North Side man everyone calls the Deacon has come up the stairs asking after “the little Cassidy girl.” It’s nothing that won’t keep, he says. But before Christmas would be a kindness.

No one at the Velvet Hour can simply act. Sal laughs it off. The woman who owns the building wants no trouble from Moran’s men brought through her door. The only answer anyone gets turns up on Mrs. Birch’s step in the dark: Friday’s crock, come home, and washed.

To find a girl she never troubled to know, Mrs. Birch will have to do everything a lifetime of minding her own business was built to avoid. She’ll have to ask questions, ask for help, and leave her range for parts of the city she has never had reason to see, all before midnight Mass on Christmas Eve.

Rich with the textures of Prohibition-era Chicago (geese from the goose man on Clark Street, radiators knocking like men coming in late to their pews, a stone step worn hollow by thirty years of other people’s feet, the bells of Holy Name over a city waiting for midnight), A Kindness Before Christmas is a Christmas mystery about the care we give without being asked, the help we have to learn to ask for, and the moment a woman who has spent her life beside the warmth finally sits down inside it.

For readers of Hazel Gaynor, Susan Meissner, and Karen White — warm, atmospheric historical fiction with a mystery ticking quietly underneath, where an ordinary woman’s courage holds up the whole story and Christmas is less about the glamour than about who is still in the room when the snow comes down.

Return to The Velvet Hour

Ruth is still keeping the books. Sal is back on the floor, whatever the doctor says. Joseph still won’t light the tree while it’s daylight. And there’s a new voice on the bandstand. Each Jazz Age Christmas Mystery stands on its own, but if you’ve spent one Christmas at The Velvet Hour, you already know the way up the stairs.

Available at:

Amazon

A Kindness Before Christmas is a standalone 1920s Christmas mystery set in Prohibition-era Chicago, 1928, and the second book in the Jazz Age Christmas Mysteries. Sherilyn Decter’s novel follows the Velvet Hour’s cook, a widow who has never asked anyone’s name. When the speakeasy’s cloakroom girl disappears, she has until midnight Mass on Christmas Eve to find her before a North Side moneylender does. It’s a warm, suspenseful story of chosen family, the kindness no one asks for, and the moment a woman who has always given without asking finally learns to ask.

Setting: Near North Side and South Side, Chicago — December 22–25, 1928
Genre: Historical Fiction · Christmas Mystery · Historical Women’s Fiction
Themes: Found family and chosen family, a widowed cook in the kitchen of a Prohibition-era Chicago speakeasy, the kindness given without being asked, learning to ask for help, a missing girl and the family that owes a mobster, the unglamorous speakeasy, a ticking-clock Christmas mystery, crossing the city and leaving the kitchen behind, Irish Catholic and South Side Chicago in 1928, midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, the people we feed and never learn to name
Author: Sherilyn Decter
Release: October 2027
Preorder on Amazon

Other Books You Might Like

The Velvet Hour — Chicago, 1927. Two days before Christmas, the Velvet Hour’s bookkeeper finds a hole in the books. Where the Jazz Age Christmas Mysteries begin.
The Cost of Becoming — One question runs through all of it: what does it cost a woman to become herself?
The Promise Trilogy — New York, 1919. Lucie Santoro and the women who refused to let history make them small.
Bootleggers’ Chronicles — Philadelphia, 1924–1931. A city running on illegal whiskey and quiet desperation.
Rum Runners’ Chronicles — Florida Coast, 1932–1933. The end of Prohibition, and the beginning of everything else.
Moonshiner Mysteries — Montana, 1927. Gold fields, ghost towns, and a woman who doesn’t take sass from anyone.

The First Star — a free Velvet Hour Christmas story

Christmas Eve, 1923. The Velvet Hour is four weeks old, its bar still raw from the lumberyard, and Joseph — thirty years a Chicago bartender — means to keep Christmas the way he has since he lost his wife: alone, with the customs she taught him. The candies twisted onto the little folding tree. The dark poppy-seed loaf. The apple cut across to find the star hidden inside. But some things can’t be done with one pair of hands — and tonight, a boy climbs the stairs toward the only warm room in the building.

A tender standalone story of the speakeasy where The Velvet Hour begins.

Send me The First Star