Snowed In at Hollin Fell

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She has six days to find £12,400. He has been sent to make sure she doesn't. Tessa Marwood's grandmother ran the Hollin Fell Inn for sixty-four years, eleven hundred feet up a Yorkshire dale, with a boiler called Duncan, a Candle Supper every December since 1962, and a loan from a pub company that falls due at noon on Christmas Eve. Edie died in February. The loan did not. Tessa has saved every penny since, and she is still short. So when a snowstorm closes the pass and strands a full house of guests at the inn for Christmas week, it looks like the best luck she's had all year — until the bookings start cancelling themselves, the cellar floods overnight through a valve nobody has touched since 2010, and a one-star review accuses her kitchen of poisoning a family who never ate there. Somebody wants her to miss that deadline. Somebody who knows exactly where the drain is. Then there's the man in the Fell Room. Joel Ashby says he's walking the Pennine Way. He arrived in brogues. He has never opened his map (the donkey ate it), he knows far too much about lead valleys, and he fixes her roof in nine minutes flat while she tells him, lying on the slates in the snow, exactly how much she owes. He works for the company that lent it. Snowed In at Hollin Fell is a Christmas romance with a mystery at its heart and a donkey called Brenda at the centre of almost everything: six snowbound days, a saboteur in the family, an elderly magician with a weakness for other people's teaspoons, a honeymooning true-crime podcaster who will not stop saying dossier, and a village of ninety-three people who come up the hill in the dark on tractor trailers, singing, because everyone came anyway. For readers who want: • Snowed-in, forced-proximity romance with a secret that has to come out — and the fallout when it does • A real mystery with real clues, and a deadline you can watch on the clock • A heroine who does her own sums and a hero who is good with his hands and bad with the truth • An inn full of eccentric guests, a vicar with opinions, and a donkey with timing • A Yorkshire Christmas you can smell: woodsmoke, candle wax and roast potatoes on the bar fire A standalone novel with a happy ending. The villain doesn't go quietly, and the inn's troubles don't all end on Christmas Eve — but love does win, by about two per cent, which is usually enough. Sensual, not explicit: love scenes are implied, never described. Mild language. A grandparent's death before the story begins, and a mother living with dementia.