Find a book

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.

Rafe Lowrie lives on the island in his late grandmother's cottage, under a roof that leaks into five containers, and every morning he photographs the sunrise from the same stone. At their first meeting he asks Juno what her fiancé looks like when he laughs. She can't remember.

Then the balance she paid for the venue turns out never to have arrived. The caterer doesn't exist either. Twelve thousand pounds of wedding money has gone to the wrong account, and Juno isn't the only bride on the island who has been robbed.

With six weeks to go, a fiancé who keeps disappearing on Tuesday evenings, an eighty-one-year-old treasurer with a green cashbook, and a thousand sunrises that turn out to have caught something nobody else saw, Juno has to find out who took the money. She also has to find out why a man with a camera sees her more clearly than the man she is supposed to marry.

• A warm, funny contemporary romance with a little mystery, set on a Northumberland tidal island in spring. • Sensual, not explicit. A wedding fraud, a lighthouse keeper's sixty-five-year proposal, and a seal called Norris. • Book four of the Merrow Bay Sisters; reads on its own.

New York perfumer Avery Lindell has built the best fragrance of her life around a single vial of lavender essence from a hill village in Provence. There is a note in it nobody can find anywhere else on earth: cold and bright, like a mountain after lightning. Now her company wants the whole field, and ten years of harvests besides.

The field belongs to the Aubanels. Luc Aubanel is proud, exhausted, and hiding a bank letter from his eighty-eight-year-old grandmother. And Marcelline Aubanel has sold her lavender to nobody outside the family for fifty years.

So Luc proposes. Not for real. Three weeks, a borrowed ring, and a village that believes every word.

Then, on the night of Bastille Day, the family distillery burns to the ground, and every drop of this year's essence goes with it. Avery's secret formula turns up in a rival Paris perfume. A press release from New York tells the whole world the engagement was a deal. And the only one on the plateau who seems to have seen through them from the start is a goat.

The Lavender Contract is a fake-engagement summer romance with a real mystery: a pétanque tournament with a family recipe at stake, fireworks over a ruined castle, a nose that can smell a lie, and a grandmother who has been watching faces across a pitch since 1961.

For readers who want:

• A fake relationship that turns real, and has to pay for the lie • A mystery solved by smell, a pencil and a stubborn goat • Provence in July: lavender, heat, a village square and Quatorze Juillet • A grandmother who is always one move ahead • 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 fire on the page, no one hurt.

Billie Hartley is thirty-five, the best inshore lifeboat helm on the Northumberland coast, and the only Hartley sister who never left Merrow Bay. She applied for the coxswain's job three times. They gave it to a man from Cornwall.

Jago Tregenza arrives with a one-eyed cat, a holdall full of spare parts and a way of saying no that Billie has never heard before. Two and a half years ago, off the Runnel Stone, he said yes to a gap in the rocks — and a young crewman didn't come home. He hasn't said yes since. Within an hour he has called her engine a disgrace. Within a week he has made her go round the outside.

Then, on the night of a storm ten, Ned Pattinson — the crabber who taught Billie to splice on the harbour wall — sends a mayday off Merrow Island and vanishes. The town lays flowers on his empty mooring. But the wreckage came ashore on the wrong side of the island, his beacon stopped after five minutes, his wife hasn't cried once, and a man in a black Range Rover keeps parking by the causeway.

To find out what really happened to Ned, Billie will have to trust the one man she can't stand — and he will have to learn to let her take the helm.

• A warm, funny seaside romance with a mystery at its heart, set on the present-day Northumberland coast. • Enemies to lovers, a night stranded in a refuge box, and a found family you'll want to move in with. Sensual, not explicit. • Book two of the Merrow Bay Sisters — can be read on its own; every sister gets her own story.

Perfect for readers of Jenny Colgan, Sarah Morgan and Holly Martin.

Maeve Keohane is the last postmistress of Portnacree, a small village on the Kerry coast. Three generations of Keohanes have stood behind that counter, and on New Year's Eve the post office closes for good.

Then Adam Larkin, a quiet English stonemason in Portnacree only to sell a cottage he never knew his late mother owned, takes down the damp wall behind her counter. Inside it is a mailbag. In the mailbag is the village's whole Christmas post from 1974: a hundred and sixty-seven cards, letters and parcels that everybody believed had been lost in a storm.

Maeve decides to deliver every one of them, by hand, before she locks the door for the last time.

So they go door to door together, in the rain, in Adam's van: a letter to Santa from a seven-year-old who is now a grandmother, a card from an old flame delivered in front of a wife of sixty years, a council letter about a septic tank. And slowly, two strangers stop being strangers.

But one letter has gone missing. Somebody breaks into the post office to find out which. And the week before that Christmas in 1974, a girl of twenty was knocked down on the cliff road by a driver who never stopped.

The Lost Christmas Post is a warm, funny, aching Irish Christmas romance: a slow burn between strangers, a real mystery fifty years cold, a village that sings carols on the harbour, and a Christmas Day swim in the Atlantic with a parish priest running a book on who will scream.

For readers who want:

• A slow burn that earns every kiss • A cold case hidden in the Christmas post • A whole village of characters: a postman who sings to every door, a sea-swimming captain six feet tall, and a priest with a notebook of odds • Kerry at Christmas: storms, carols, the Wren Boys and the Atlantic in December • A happy ending that has to be earned

A standalone novel with a happy ending. Not everything gets there, but love does, and the truth.

Sensual, not explicit: love scenes are implied, never described. Mild language. A death in the past; a parent's death before the story begins; a fire.

Clem Rafuse is a fruit-tree scientist in Ontario who hasn't been home for the harvest in fifteen years. Then her grandfather has a stroke on a ladder, and she drives fifteen hundred kilometers to the family orchard on Nova Scotia's Minas Basin. There she finds Ezra Vail, a retired Halifax firefighter who bought the farm next door, running the harvest and doing it the right way.

The Rafuses own something no one else in the world has: the Mercy Pippin, a russet apple with red flesh that grows on one dying tree planted in 1881. Her grandfather grafted forty young trees to save it.

Then the young trees disappear in the night. Someone cuts a ring round the old tree's trunk. A big fruit company unveils "its" new apple at the church fall fair. And the neighbor Clem is starting to trust knows something he isn't telling her.

With the Fundy tide rising twice a day, a grandfather who can only spell his warnings one letter at a time, and a cider barn about to burn, Clem has to decide what she came home for, and who she can believe.

The Orchard at Cape Mercy is a slow-burn Canadian romance with a real mystery at its heart, set in apple country at Thanksgiving: three turkeys and one oven, a pumpkin weigh-off that ends in a recount, a church lady who keeps the only records that matter, and a truck lost to the Bay of Fundy.

For readers who want:

• A homecoming slow burn between two people who both know how to keep quiet • A mystery you can solve with a paring knife and a fair ledger from 1912 • Nova Scotia in the fall: dikes, tides, cider, and a whole village watching • A family that argues about gravy and would die for each other • 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 stroke and its aftermath; a barn fire; a parent's death before the story begins.

On a November night in 2006, Katell Kerguen's father took his boat out to the black rocks at the mouth of the Aber in a storm, and never came home. Six weeks later she left her Breton village for Oregon, without saying goodbye to the boy who had opened an oyster for her on those rocks when she was sixteen.

Now she's a shellfish toxicologist, and the oysters on the Aber Kerlann are dying. The village says it's a virus. The mayor says it's a virus. Katell can smell from the top of the hill that it isn't.

Erwan Tanguy stayed. He runs his great-grandfather's oyster beds, writes the count in pencil in a green ledger every tide, and has never forgiven her. But he's the only one who can take her out to the rocks.

What they find there will close the whole estuary, turn the village against her, and bring a boatyard owner with a beautiful plan for a marina very close to getting everything he wants. Unless a grandmother who has cheated at cards every Thursday for thirty-six years finally plays the card she has been hiding for twenty.

The Oyster Tide is a second-chance romance with a real mystery: a Breton fest-noz, a gavotte danced by the little finger, an old man who speaks only in weather forecasts, and a lost boat that was never just a storm.

For readers who want:

• A second chance that has to face why it was needed • A mystery solved at low tide with a sample bottle • Brittany in storm season: granite, oysters, cider and the sea • A grandmother who is always one card ahead • 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 death at sea, twenty years in the past.