From the Riley Locke desk
Vivian Forest flies to England for Christmas as her daughter's plus-one, meets the Queen's private secretary across a stately-home corridor, and Jasmine Guillory's 2019 novel does the rarest thing on this shelf: it hands the romance to the mother. The desk has a standing complaint that the genre retires its characters at thirty-five, and this book is the complaint answered, a holiday love story between two people in their fifties with whole lives already built, and the desk shelved it with real gratitude.
Vivian is a social worker from Oakland, competent, warm, and quietly tired of deferring her own wants; Malcolm Hudson is the private secretary, silver-haired, impeccable, and startled to find himself flirting by note and by walk through a sugared English countryside. The holiday setting does what holiday settings are for, granting permission, and the book's central question is not whether they will fall, because they fall with the ease of two adults who know exactly what they like, but what two established lives an ocean apart are willing to renegotiate for it. That question is treated as real, and the answer stays sealed, though the desk will say the book refuses the cheap version of it.
What we admire most is the grown-up gravity. The obstacles are calendars, careers, and the polite gravity of institutions, not misunderstandings, and every conflict is conducted by people who say what they mean after at most one walk to think about it. Guillory writes food, gifts, and comfort with her usual generosity, and the fantasy on offer, being seen clearly and chosen unhurriedly in midlife, is dispensed at full strength. There is also a running gift-exchange thread, small parcels chosen with increasing nerve, that the desk rates the book's best structural idea, intimacy measured in wrapping paper.
The heat, at eye level, is present, on the page, and tender rather than incendiary, written with the confidence of characters who have no time for embarrassment. The book is fourth in a loosely linked series and stands entirely alone.
Honest notices: low external stakes by design, a pace that strolls, workplace duty versus personal want as the only real antagonist, and a transatlantic logistics question resolved with perhaps one convenient softening, which the desk forgives at Christmas.
Who is this for? Readers who have ever wanted the mother of the bride to get the book, holiday travellers, and anyone who suspects romance improves when the leads have furniture they already own. Give it to your own mother, and expect it back with an opinion.