Basically the plot is: employees of a toy store are mysteriously disappearing, so Jayne Frost is sent to investigate disguised as the new employee. Without a clear idea of what her right place is, without any friends, at the age of almost thirty she finds all that and more.
Adding some details:
Jayne is a winter elf, living at the North Pole. Her father is Jack Frost and she calls Santa Claus “Uncle Kris”. The people who disappeared from the face of the Earth were working at Santa’s Workshop in a town called Nocturne Falls, where everyday is Halloween and therefore supernaturals can walk being themselves, no need to disguise their non-human identities because tourists simply think they’re entertainers.
Once there, she meets more winter elves working at the shop, she meets again her old boyfriend Cooper, the handsome summer elf she dated in college, and also meets Greyson the sexy vampire.
What with her being the winter princess, she wears a magic bracelet that alters her image (to look different from herself but still a winter elf).
She takes the job seriously; she understood that her father was really concerned about the situation, and he told her that he was sending her because they needed someone they could absolutely trust. That’s something that hits you, and she was glad to know that at least they trusted her, even if she had yet to find a place for herself in the company. When everybody knows you’re a princess, and the boss’s daughter, it’s very difficult to be treated spontaneously. That’s the reason she has no friends; she had one but remembers with regret that she hasn’t heard much of her best friend Lark since she became a famous dj in Europe.
Jayne takes on the name Lilibeth because it’s her second name, so easy to remember, and Holiday, a very common name among elves. She makes friends with her fellow workers Juniper and Buttercup (not a coincidence, her parents were Princess Bride fans), and finds a life for herself that she never had before, when she was treated like royalty.
She’s not happy to meet her ex Cooper, because he broke her heart when he left her, and is surprised to hear him saying that Jayne (he doesn’t know she’s Jayne) broke his heart because she thought she couldn’t take a summer elf to visit her royal parents.
In order to gain information, Lilibeth dates both Cooper and Greyson. The things she’d do to help her family... :-p
All the employers left behind a note saying they were leaving, but they went completely off the grid, impossible to find anywhere. She breaks into the last employer’s apartment to find that he left everything: clothes, mail, personal stuff, and even his cat behind. That doesn’t look like normal behaviour at all, and Lilibeth takes the cat called Spider to her apartment and adopts him.
The solution? She thought the manager Toly was responsible, and in a way he kinda was although it’s not clear how much he knew or how big a part he had in it. It was all his granddaughter’s plan. Her only relative, who had always lived in a human town and never been to the NP, she used to ran a B&B with her husband but after a messy divorce she had difficulties. Toly secretly hired her cleaning service for the store apartments, and took elves with powerful magic to dinner, and it seems like that’s all he did; his granddaughter Cookie built a machine that stripped the magic out of elves, basically leaving them humans with no idea of who they were before she took them to work for her, and sold the crystal she obtained on the black market making lots of money. Nothing more is said, but I say that Toly had to notice that all the elves he took to dinner with Cookie mysteriously disappeared, that was a hell of a coincidence, but he said nothing about it to anyone, so he might be a bit responsible. Also, the notes were written on his paper... maybe he only supplied her with company-provided stuff, and Cookie somehow had the elves write those on it, but again he said nothing. Six elves whose magic and old identities is lost forever.
When Lilibeth finds Owen (the last employee to ‘quit’) strapped to the machine looking very weak, she’s hit on the head and finds herself strapped to it instead when she comes to. Lucky for her, Cooper noticed that she had stolen his firefighter badge (giving her access to restricted areas) and had come back, joined by Greyson who had come to meet her.
Greyson is soon out of the game because the cold knocks him out, but Cooper is able to fight Cookie’s ice attacks with his fire, giving Jayne time to free herself with her magic, making the machine so cold she breaks it.
She was successful, her father is very proud and she’s glad, but when he tells her that they’ll close that shop she refuses, she doesn’t want it closed, Juniper and Buttercup out of jobs or relocated and separated, and she insists that he gives it to her, making her the new manager. He can’t but agree.
The two girls are not happy that she lied to her, but they understand and forgive her.
Cooper obviously has a good chat with her, after finding out who she really is. He tells her that he left her before she left him, having heard that she had no serious intention and would have been ashamed to bring home a summer elf. She had heard that he didn’t much care for her but only boasted with his friends about doing a princess. Guess what, Lark had separated them. The one person she had thought all those years was her best friend (maybe because she didn’t have anyone else) had actually betrayed her.
They make peace, realizing that they had both believed a lie, and agree to be friends.
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