What is her secret in Mistletoe Murders? Three seasons of clues add up to one job Emily used to do
Emily Lane runs the most cheerful Christmas shop in Fletcher's Grove and solves a murder every December. The skills she uses to do it didn't come from selling ornaments.
Mistletoe Murders returns for season 3 on Thursday, November 5, at 8 p.m. ET on Hallmark Channel, with episodes reaching Hallmark+ the next day, per Parade. Seasons 1 and 2 also landed on Netflix in the U.S. on November 1.
If you're catching up there, Sarah Drew's Emily will look like a sweet small-town shop owner with an unusually good eye for crime scenes. The show spends two seasons explaining why.
The new season opens with "Don't Fear the Wreather," in which Emily and Detective Sam Wilner (Peter Mooney) investigate a wreathmaker, played by Catherine Bell, who's accused of killing her husbands. The real mystery, as it has been since the pilot, is Emily.
The clues so far
The show spreads its hints across six two-part mysteries:
- Season 1, "Poison in a Pear Tree": The first case is a poisoned cookie, and it leads straight back to Emily's shop.
- Season 1, "Death of a Humbug": A murder victim's scavenger hunt forces Emily to confront her past for the first time.
- Season 2, "Cold War": A missing chess coach stirs up echoes of her old life.
- Season 2, "The Ides of December": Flashbacks show teenage Emily at boarding school as a gifted programmer who joins a decoding club and starts experimenting with hacking. By the end of the case, she picks an online handle: Chimera.
- Season 2, Sam's side investigation: Sam has an expert decode coordinates he photographed at Emily's house, and they lead him to the same name.
By the end of season 2, a viewer who's been paying attention knows Emily can code, crack ciphers and stay calm around a dead body. The finale explains where she learned all three.
The job: hacker, then intelligence
In the season 2 finale, Emily tells Sam the truth. Her real name is Grace.
As a teenager she was Chimera, a hacker, and her first love, Aaron, was part of the hacks with her. When she found evidence tying him to terrorist funding, she shut down his computer. Aaron got away when the police arrived, and she was the one arrested.
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After that, Grace cooperated with federal authorities, who believed Aaron was rebuilding Chimera without her, and she went to work in intelligence, hunting the man she used to trust. Sarah Drew has described it as Emily's "CIA past," per Soaps.com. One operation went wrong, she led her team into a trap built on intel she thought was solid, and the world decided Grace had died. Emily Lane, Christmas shop owner, is who she became next.
Emily didn't learn to read a crime scene at the Christmas shop. She learned it hacking for fun as a teenager and hunting her ex for a living afterward.
What season 3 does with it
The season 2 finale ends with Aaron (Aaron Ashmore) at her door the morning after she confides in Sam: "Merry Christmas, Grace. You look pretty good for a dead woman." Season 3 picks up from there.
"It's really all about her past crashing back in and her needing to solve this thing that she feels responsible for."
— Sarah Drew, on season 3, to Soaps.com
The difference this time, Drew said, is that Emily isn't facing it alone. She has Sam "walking beside her," which may be the most dangerous thing a former spy can give a small-town detective with a teenage daughter. Holly Robinson Peete also guest-stars this season, and the cases are titled "We Three Kims" and "A Mystery on 34th Street." The cases will rotate, and Aaron is the one guest who isn't going anywhere.
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