Find a book

Bronte Callister is the captain of the Tallow Bay surf club, on a long beach on the New South Wales coast. It's two weeks before Christmas, it's thirty-four degrees, and her ex-fiancé is marrying somebody else at the club on Saturday. The whole town is waiting to watch her watch him.

Wes Harland is a fire investigator from California on a three-month exchange. He walks straight past the flags into the only rip on the beach on a Friday afternoon, and she has to go in after him in front of forty people. The next night, at the club Christmas party, her mother shouts across two hundred people that he's Bronte's boyfriend. He puts his arm round her and doesn't let go.

He has his reasons. Somebody has been lighting small fires on the headland every few Saturdays, each one closer to the old club boatshed, and in a town that won't talk to outsiders, a local girlfriend opens doors. Then the club's tower fund turns out to be empty. Eighty-six thousand dollars, raised by three Christmas raffles, is gone. And the only record of who held the card is in a filing cabinet in the boatshed.

A Summer Christmas is a fake-dating romance with a real mystery. It has a Santa who arrives on a jet ski, a Christmas Day cricket match on the sand, a roast dinner in thirty-four degrees, and a cockatoo who repeats everything he has heard, including the one thing somebody didn't want repeated.

For readers who want:

• A fake relationship with rules on a napkin, and the rules breaking one by one • A mystery solved with a stopwatch, a bank printout and an exercise book in pencil • Australia at Christmas: surf, sausage rolls, carols on the sand and a hot westerly • A heroine who saves people for a living, and a hero who learns to be saved • 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 bushfire and a burning building, with no one killed.

The Pascoes and the Trevennas have not agreed on anything since Christmas Eve, 1953. Nobody in the Cornish fishing village of Polgarrow can remember why. They only know which end of the pub to stand at.

Then, at her grandmother's wake, boatbuilder and lifeboat helm Kerensa Pascoe watches ninety-three-year-old Walter Trevenna stand up in front of the whole village and make an announcement. He will give his half of the old pilchard palace on the quay — the lifeboat's home for sixty-five years — to the lifeboat, for ever. On one condition.

A Pascoe and a Trevenna must be engaged to be married by Christmas Day.

There is exactly one available Trevenna. Kit, a London chef with a star to his name and a return ticket, who rammed Kerensa's dinghy when they were twelve and laughed.

So they get engaged. For pretend. For Walter, and the lifeboat, and a building. It will end in January, and nobody will get hurt.

Except that her grandmother's will has vanished, somebody is searching her cottage by torchlight, Walter's hearing aids keep going mysteriously flat before his capacity assessment, a developer in a gilet wants the whole harbour — and Kit has been cast as the back half of the pantomime horse, with Kerensa's furious uncle in the front.

And there is a storm coming on Christmas Eve.

An Engagement for Christmas is a warm, funny, heart-in-your-mouth Cornish Christmas romance: a fake engagement between feuding families, a real mystery with fair clues, a village pantomime that goes gloriously wrong, and a lifeboat that has to launch when it matters most.

For readers who want:

• A fake engagement that stops being fake at exactly the wrong moment • Two feuding families, one very old love story, and seventy-three years of stubbornness • A real mystery — who took the will, and where did Gran hide it? • A village panto, a pantomime horse with two very unwilling halves, and a director who was in the original Cats (at the back) • Christmas on the Cornish coast, with a lifeboat, a storm, and a happy ending that has to be earned

A standalone novel with a happy ending. Not everything is saved, and not everything that is lost comes back — but love wins, and the lifeboat goes out.

Sensual, not explicit: love scenes are implied, never described. Mild language. A grandmother's death before the story begins; peril at sea.

Marit Halvorsen runs the ski patrol at Larch Valley, a small resort town in the Alberta Rockies. In 2018 the Kestrel Couloir buried her for fourteen minutes. Her fiancé, the forecaster who had opened it, dug the last meter with his bare hands, sat outside her hospital room for three days, and then left her a one-line note and drove to the airport.

Now it's December, and the Kestrel keeps sliding at three in the morning, on still, clear nights, for no reason anyone can find. Marit knows the crown is wrong. The resort says it's natural. And the province sends its new regional forecaster to look.

It's Jonah Ashdown.

With a big mountain company ready to buy the resort at the right price, charges missing from the explosives magazine, and a town that remembers exactly who opened the Kestrel on her, Marit and Jonah have to work together to find out who is bringing the mountain down, before Christmas, and before someone is under it.

Avalanche Hearts is a second-chance Christmas romance with a real mystery: an ugly-sweater ski race, a Santa who keeps losing his beard, a grandmother who bakes and knits and is always right, a torchlight parade down a mountain, and an avalanche dog with very firm opinions about who is staying.

For readers who want:

• A second chance that has to face the reason it was needed • A sabotage mystery told in snow, a scorched glove and a forged signature • A ski town at Christmas, from the patrol shack to the bakery • A dog who steals hats and decides things • 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. Avalanche peril, a burial and a rescue on the page.

Casey Maddox has spent every dollar she has turning an old hop barn in a Bavarian market town into a brewery. The town has drunk one beer for four hundred years, from the Brauerei Brandl across the square, and it has no intention of drinking hers. It doesn't help that her grandfather was the apprentice who walked out of the Brandl doorway in 1956 and never came back.

Hannes Brandl has a leaking roof, a loan from 1998, an uncle who wants to sell, and a man from a brewing conglomerate who wants to buy. The one thing he's sure of is his Festbier. Then the town decides the autumn fest beer by blind tasting, and his beer turns sour in the tank.

Casey wins the tent. Two days later the Brandl master yeast disappears from the tower, and a DNA test says the yeast in Casey's steel case is the same strain. The whole town knows what that means. She stole it. Or her grandfather did.

Four hundred and twelve boxes in the Brandl archive hold the truth about 1956. A brass band needs a tuba. And a cow with a flowering crown on her horns keeps trying to walk up the wrong path.

Brewer's Luck is a rivals-to-lovers romance with a real mystery. It has a brass band, a tailor who has fitted every Brandl since 1972, a very old man with a euphonium, and a festival tent where three thousand people sing the last song standing on the benches.

For readers who want:

• Rivals across a market square who have to trust each other • A mystery solved with a microscope and a stores ledger • Bavaria in festival season: Lederhosen, dirndls, the cows coming down from the mountain • A grandfather's name to clear, seventy years late • 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. No violence on the page.

Harper Quinlan is a fire-safety engineer from Pittsburgh. She doesn't go near bonfires, and she hasn't watched a firework since the winter her father went into a burning warehouse and didn't come out. So of course her firm sends her to a small town on the Valencian coast for the Fallas: nineteen days of firecrackers at eight in the morning, a thunderous two o'clock show every afternoon, and a final night when the whole town burns the giant monuments it has spent a year building.

Her job is to certify the biggest one: El Fènix, a twenty-three-meter phoenix fourteen meters from the town hall balcony. On her first morning she tells its artist it's too tall.

Nacho Ferrús builds fallas the way his grandfather did, by eye, with a secret cut in the mast that nobody outside the family has ever seen. He has thirteen days to finish his bird, a treasurer who keeps delaying the last payment, and no time for an American with a decibel meter.

Then somebody sets fire to his yard. And the insurance on the phoenix turns out to be worth a great deal more if it burns early.

Fire Season is an enemies-to-lovers romance with a real mystery. It has a paella contest and a slice of chorizo that scandalizes a whole town, a grandmother who has judged the rice for forty years, a bell tower of two hundred and eleven steps, and the loudest two o'clock in Europe.

For readers who want:

• Opposites who have to learn each other's trade • A mystery solved with a stopwatch, a wiring plan and a match flag • Spain in festival season: orange blossom, gunpowder, silk and fire • A heroine who learns to let go without losing herself • 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 past death in a fire, off the page; a tense bomb-disposal scene.

For forty-one years, Fontenot's Bakery on Magazine Street has baked the official king cake of the Krewe of Mirabelle. Delphine Fontenot braids it the way her grandmother taught her at the age of seven: four strands, never three.

Then Owen Mercer opens across the street. He is a burned-out Chicago pastry chef with his late grandmother's recipe box and a three-strand braid. On Twelfth Night, the blind tasting goes to him.

That same morning, the krewe's captain calls in a debt on Delphine's bakery that her father swore was forgiven, and gives her until Ash Wednesday to pay.

The forgiving letter is somewhere in the building. Her father hid it "under the lid," and she has opened every lid she owns. Somebody switches off her walk-in in the night. A page goes missing from the krewe's minute book. And when the float barn burns, Delphine and Owen are inside it.

King Cake Rules is a warm, funny New Orleans romance: rivals to lovers across one street, a real mystery with a Carnival deadline, a grandmother who rigs the king cake baby, a pink costume nobody should have to wear in public, and an elderly parrot who knows a great deal more than he is saying.

For readers who want:

• Rivals to lovers, with flour on everything • A small-business mystery with a deadline and a paper trail • New Orleans at Carnival: parades, brass bands, king cake and Mardi Gras morning • A whole street of characters, including a parrot who tells tall men to go to hell • 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 fire.

Hallie Sorensen runs the tiny museum of Pell Harbor, Maine, and she holds the keys to Tern Point Light. The day after Labor Day, the government sells the lighthouse at auction. Her little historical society, run by a retired teacher in a bow tie and fed by a church pie committee, means to buy it and keep it open to everyone.

Then Nate Whitaker drives up from Boston. He is an architect, he is seasick, he puts mayonnaise on a lobster roll, and he has come to survey the tower for the man who wants to turn it into a luxury inn.

On his first morning, he finds that somebody has been loosening the railing forty feet above the rocks.

Somebody else has a key. The great glass lens in the town museum no longer throws rainbows. A report says the tower is falling down, and it isn't. And the Society's money is not where it should be. With the auction clock running down, an enemy from Boston turns out to be the only person in town who can read a set of plans, and a very bad sailor ends up in a lobster-boat race.

Last Light at Tern Point is a warm, funny Maine romance: enemies to lovers in the fog, a real mystery with a deadline, a lobsterman grandfather of eighty-one who will not stay off the water, and a church pie committee run like a cartel.

For readers who want:

• Enemies to lovers with a clock ticking • A small-town mystery with the money in plain sight • Maine at the end of summer: fog, lobster rolls, a boat race and a lighthouse • A whole town of characters, including a Newfoundland dog who is afraid of gulls • 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 grandparent's death before the story begins; danger at sea.

The man writing the environmental survey ties up his boat at the old stone jetty at dawn. Magnus Halcrow is a Shetland marine surveyor with a broken nose and very bad coffee, and he writes down exactly what he measures. Posy marches down the jetty and demands his name and his boat. He tells her the bank owns two thirds of the boat. Then he asks to see her notebook.

Because on fourteen mornings the seals have gone before sunrise. Somebody is flying a drone over the beach in the half-light. Somebody is raking out the little terns' nests and stealing the cameras, so the survey will find nothing worth saving. Then, in thick fog, the engines of Magnus's boat die three hundred metres off a reef.

Now Posy and Magnus have a tide table, a lighthouse keeper's exercise book and a clause nobody has read since 1974. They also have one chance, on the morning the midsummer spring tide comes in over the causeway.

• A warm, funny seaside romance with a real mystery, set on the Northumberland coast in June. • Sensual, not explicit. Seals, terns, a lifeboat, and five sisters. • The fifth and final book of The Merrow Bay Sisters; reads on its own.

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.

Jules Garnier is not, whatever the town has decided, French. He is a baker's son from Lewisham with flour to the elbows, a laugh you can hear from the harbour and a very clean dishwasher, and on his opening day his window holds a Christmas tart that tastes exactly like her father's.

The night before, her father's recipe book disappeared from a locked workroom.

The book goes back to 1968. It holds her granny's vanilla, her dad's handwriting and a pencil outline of her own hand at eight years old. To get it back, Delia will have to work beside the one man in town she has sworn to hate. She will have to meet a formidable old baker, learn the story of a recipe swapped every Christmas Eve for twenty-eight years, and decide, before the year runs out, where the salt tastes right.

• A warm, funny contemporary romance with a little mystery, set in a Northumberland seaside town at Christmas. • Sensual, not explicit. Rival bakers, a found family, and a heroine who says the true thing first. • Book three of the Merrow Bay Sisters; reads on its own.

Maisie Kettering quit her accounting job in Ohio, spent her savings, and wrote to forty-three Paris pâtisseries asking to be an apprentice for six months. One answered. Three lines. If you are late you may not come.

Mathis Berthelot is the grumpiest pastry chef in the Marais. He throws her croissants in the trash on the first morning. He has not smiled since his grandfather died and the green notebook holding the family's recipes vanished on the day of the funeral, taking with it the secret of the famous Bûche des Neiges, whose snow crackles like a winter morning when the knife goes in. His rent is about to triple. His only hope is a televised Christmas competition.

And the only creature in the shop who likes Maisie on sight is his dachshund, who wears a Santa hat from Advent to Epiphany and bites anybody who tries to take it off.

Then someone puts salt in their sugar. Someone pulls the plug on their blast chiller on live television. And the judges' scores do not add up, which is a problem for somebody, because Maisie has never met a set of numbers she could not read.

Sugar in the Snow is a grumpy-sunshine Christmas romance with a real mystery: a bûche collapse on live TV rescued in fourteen minutes, a grocery bill from 1971, snow falling on the Seine, and a dog who knows exactly who belongs in his kitchen.

For readers who want:

• A grump who melts slowly, and has to earn her back • A heroine whose superpower is spreadsheets • Paris at Christmas, from a bakery kitchen at four in the morning • A lost family recipe and a competition that is rigged • A dachshund in a Santa hat

A standalone novel with a happy ending.

Sensual, not explicit: one love scene, implied and never described. Mild language.

Imogen Hartley is thirty-seven, a London divorce solicitor on the brink of partnership, and home in Merrow Bay for one weekend — until her mother stands up over the crab and announces that she has sold Hartley's, the family's 1936 seafront ice-cream parlour, to a boutique hotel company, and is off to see the world.

Rhodri Emlyn is the architect hired to turn it into a hotel. He is Welsh, recently and very politely divorced, and he has fallen hopelessly in love with a black glass counter and a terrazzo floor full of scallop shells. He is not supposed to fall for the eldest Hartley daughter as well.

Then the sale starts going wrong. Forty-one planning objections arrive overnight — seventeen of them from people buried in the churchyard. Someone pulls the plug on four hundred litres of ice cream. A bat roost appears in a loft that has never seen a bat. With five weeks to exchange, four sisters, a seventy-two-year-old ice-cream maker and a great many gulls, Imogen has to work out who is trying to stop the sale — and what she wants for herself.

• A warm, funny seaside romance with a mystery at its heart, set on the present-day Northumberland coast. • Sensual, not explicit. Two narrators. A found family you'll want to move in with. • Book one of the Merrow Bay Sisters — every sister gets her own story.

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

Dr. Sadie Brannock bought the vet clinic in Tamarack, Montana, in September. By December, half the valley would still rather drive forty miles than let a woman from the Cities touch their cattle. Her only reliable company is a camel nobody else would take.

Cole Bridger runs the Heart K, the ranch his family has worked since 1911. Somebody is cutting his fences and stealing his cows in the dark. At the end of the year the bank will count every bred cow on the place, and if there are fewer than 380, it can call his loan.

Then his grandmother enters him in the church's Cowboy Christmas Auction, and the only way out is to be engaged. So he announces that he is. To the vet. Who has just walked in with the camel.

Now they have to be convincing until Christmas Day: at church, at the dance, at his grandmother's table, under a bale of mistletoe with the whole valley watching. And every week the count gets closer to the number that could take the Heart K away.

The Christmas Brand is a warm, funny Montana romance: a fake engagement that stops being fake, a real mystery told in brands and scars, a rodeo-queen grandmother who has arranged everything, and a camel who may just save Christmas by lying down.

For readers who want:

• A fake engagement with rules, and one that breaks every one of them • A ranch mystery with a deadline and a real clue a vet would spot • Montana at Christmas: blizzards, a living nativity, a church auction and a line shack in a storm • A whole valley of characters, including a camel with opinions • 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 and a grandparent's death before the story begins; animals hurt and put down.

Every Advent for ninety-five years, Edinburgh has queued to see the Wee Red Lassie — a girl in a scarlet cloak, singing on the frozen Nor' Loch in a painting from 1785 that hangs over one small gallery's fireplace every December.

This year a ginger cat goes for a fiddler's bow, a tray of mulled wine goes over, and paintings conservator Isla Rennie takes the Lassie back to her studio to clean.

Under the varnish, she finds that the city's favourite painting is a fake.

The insurers send a loss adjuster to find out where the real one went. He is Euan Strachan — who walked out three weeks before their Christmas wedding seven years ago, leaving a note that said it isn't you, the same month Isla's evidence sent his father to prison for forgery.

And the police already have a suspect. His father.

Now there's a thistle hidden under the paint, a break-in at the studio, a charming chairman in a hurry to be paid, a London dealer with very cold eyes, and twenty-four days until a crate leaves Leith for Geneva. To find the painting, Isla will have to trust the one man she swore she never would again — and he will have to tell her, at last, why he left.

The Christmas Forgery is a second-chance Christmas romance with a real mystery at its heart: a ceilidh band with an average age of seventy-six and a rule never to stop playing for anything short of fire, a gallery cat who hates everyone except the insurance man, a borrowed kilt four inches too short, and a big wheel that stops at the top at exactly the wrong moment.

For readers who want:

• A second chance built on a secret worth keeping, and worth telling • A real art-world mystery with fair clues, paint science and a deadline • Edinburgh at Christmas: the market, the Meadows, a ceilidh, Hogmanay on Calton Hill • A grandmother who plays the accordion like a weapon • A happy ending that is earned, not given

A standalone novel with a happy ending. Not every villain is caught, and not everything that is saved comes back undamaged — but love wins, and the band never stops playing.

Sensual, not explicit: love scenes are implied, never described. Mild language.

On a short, smart street in London's West End, two department stores face each other across forty feet of tarmac. Every first of December they unveil their Christmas windows at the same moment, and half of London comes to watch.

Ruby Adeyemi dresses the windows of Halloran's, the creaking family store her boss's great-grandmother founded in 1897. Theo Marchetti dresses the windows of Beaumont & Vale, the glass-and-gold palace across the road. His windows have won three Christmases running. He nods at her on the pavement. She would quite like to throw something at him.

This year it isn't a prize at stake. Halloran's 84-year-old owner has signed a deal with the store across the road: if Halloran's December takings fail to beat last year's, she must sell.

Then, twelve seconds after the switch-on, every light in Ruby's windows goes out. Somebody is getting into them at night. And one Sunday morning the store's famous diamond necklace, in its centre window every Christmas for over a century, vanishes, and turns up round the neck of Theo's ice queen.

Theo is the obvious suspect. Ruby is the only person who believes he didn't do it. With her windows sealed by the police in the busiest week of the year, the only way to save the shop may be to ask her rival for help, and to put something in the windows that nobody on the street has ever seen.

The Christmas Window is a warm, funny, suspenseful London Christmas romance: rivals to lovers, a real mystery with fair clues, a staff Secret Santa, a lift that stops between floors, and a mother who sends forty texts a day and ends up as an angel in a shop window.

For readers who want:

• Rivals to lovers across a very narrow street • A missing necklace, a sabotaged switch-on, and a countdown to Christmas Eve • A family department store with a haberdashery counter that knows everything • A mother from Cork who is nobody's fool, and an Italian father who runs a café in Clerkenwell • Christmas in London, and a happy ending that has to be earned

A standalone novel with a happy ending. The shop is saved. Not everything in it is, but love wins, and the windows light up.

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

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.