The Christmas Window

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For seven years she has tried to beat him. Now she needs him to light her window. On a short, smart street in London's West End, two department stores face each other across forty feet of tarmac. Every first of December they unveil their Christmas windows at the same moment, and half of London comes to watch. Ruby Adeyemi dresses the windows of Halloran's, the creaking family store her boss's great-grandmother founded in 1897. Theo Marchetti dresses the windows of Beaumont & Vale, the glass-and-gold palace across the road. His windows have won three Christmases running. He nods at her on the pavement. She would quite like to throw something at him. This year it isn't a prize at stake. Halloran's 84-year-old owner has signed a deal with the store across the road: if Halloran's December takings fail to beat last year's, she must sell. Then, twelve seconds after the switch-on, every light in Ruby's windows goes out. Somebody is getting into them at night. And one Sunday morning the store's famous diamond necklace, in its centre window every Christmas for over a century, vanishes, and turns up round the neck of Theo's ice queen. Theo is the obvious suspect. Ruby is the only person who believes he didn't do it. With her windows sealed by the police in the busiest week of the year, the only way to save the shop may be to ask her rival for help, and to put something in the windows that nobody on the street has ever seen. The Christmas Window is a warm, funny, suspenseful London Christmas romance: rivals to lovers, a real mystery with fair clues, a staff Secret Santa, a lift that stops between floors, and a mother who sends forty texts a day and ends up as an angel in a shop window. For readers who want: • Rivals to lovers across a very narrow street • A missing necklace, a sabotaged switch-on, and a countdown to Christmas Eve • A family department store with a haberdashery counter that knows everything • A mother from Cork who is nobody's fool, and an Italian father who runs a café in Clerkenwell • Christmas in London, and a happy ending that has to be earned A standalone novel with a happy ending. The shop is saved. Not everything in it is, but love wins, and the windows light up. Sensual, not explicit: love scenes are implied, never described. Mild language. A parent's death before the story begins.