How the Grump Saved Christmas

Elias Stoneheart works too much and smiles too little. He has come back to Tilikum, the town he grew up in, with a business goal: buy the struggling family farm and its Christmas Village.

The farm belongs to Isabelle Cook, and she has no intention of selling. She and Elias share a painful past, since he ended things with her years ago. Now his buyout offer and her fight to keep the land push the two exes into the same rooms again.

This is a second-chance romance with a grumpy-sunshine pairing, set in a small town at Christmas. The banter is saucy, the holiday trimmings are thick, and the tone stays cozy and light. Elias's gruff manner and Isabelle's warmth rub against each other, and the thaw between them is slow.

The story also works as a small-town retelling of A Christmas Carol. It takes place in the same Tilikum community as Claire Kingsley's other small-town series. Old wounds have to be faced before old feelings can surface, and the book ends happily, as a holiday romance should.

The question running through it is whether a man who came to take the farm can be won over by the woman defending it.