The Ice Palace

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She has cut the lake ice for her father's palace every winter since she came home. This year an American champion has come to build it instead. For thirty-eight years the Tremblays have built the ice palace of Saint-Aubin-des-Neiges, a village on a frozen lake in Québec, out of nineteen hundred blocks cut by hand. Now the carnival's new ski-resort sponsor has hired Wyatt Callender, world ice-art champion from Fairbanks, Alaska, to design something bigger. Élise Tremblay and her crew get to cut his blocks. His design has a spiraling tower twenty-one meters high. Élise says it will fall down. Her father says it will be something to see before it does. Then the palace starts to crack. One side of the tower goes soft overnight at minus twenty-four. And the only clue is a small round hole that should not be there. Now two rivals who cannot agree on anything are keeping watch together in a pickup truck at two in the morning, while a six-foot otter mascot nobody will admit to wearing walks across the lake with a lantern. The carnival opens in eleven days. The inspector is losing patience. The prize money is about to vanish. And when the evidence points at one of them, the other has to decide what to believe. The Ice Palace is a warm, funny enemies-to-lovers romance set at a Québec winter carnival: a snow bath in borrowed pineapple swim trunks, an ice-canoe race through broken ice, a village that notices everything, and a palace that must stand until the lights go out on closing night. For readers who want: • Rivals who respect each other's hands long before they admit anything else • A sabotage mystery with a real clue you can taste • A Québec village in February: tuques, tourtière, a dépanneur and a mascot with a secret • A heroine who gets it badly wrong and sets it right in public • A happy ending that has to be earned A standalone novel with a happy ending. Sensual, not explicit: one love scene, implied and never described. Mild language. A parent's death before the story begins; a near-drowning.