Christmas Scrooges / Postage Due: Christmas Card in a Bottle Mystery

By Daniel B. Woods

Pensacola at Christmas. A retired postal chief turns Christmas Scrooge, seizing the coast's Christmas Cards in Bottles and stamping each one "Postage in a Bottle - Fees Due."
Across the bay, a lighthouse door hides a missing sailor-and a town must decide whether to keep quiet...or deliver.

When Ernest Foreman is forced out by a hard-line Rear Admiral, he weaponizes order and hoards the shoreline's bottled Christmas cards. Each confiscated note is a heart on hold-until four unlikely couriers refuse to let December lie:

Samantha Hale, the Admiral's daughter, carrying hope like a red ribbon at her wrist.

Detective Leigh Dorsey, whose law actually bites.

Oliver Quinn, a reporter with a camera that tells the truth.

An angel in work boots, whose only job is making sure good news arrives.

As the base spins a tidy story, evidence leaks-a hospital wristband, three Cokes on a tray, a motion log that doesn't match the weather. The town builds a Receiver's Table and turns a crowd into a choir. On Christmas morning, a hatch must open, a man must repent in daylight, and a message must do the one thing messages are born for:

Arrive.

CHRISTMAS SCROOGE: No Postage, No Christmas is a lighthouse-lit mystery of accountability and grace-clean, heart-pounding, and cinematic-about what happens when a city decides that delivery is not decoration, it's salvation. Fans of A Christmas Carol re-imaginings, coastal suspense, and redemption arcs will feel right at home on Sea Coast Highway.

Signed. Sealed. Delivered. No Postage Due.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GBTH77NL
• ISBN13: 9798279263233
• Release Date: December 2025
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 218 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 7.0" x 10.0"