The Secret of Snow

Sonny Dunes has spent her career forecasting perfect weather in Palm Springs, and when her station replaces her with a virtual meteorologist, the only offer she gets is from a small Michigan market where winter is the entire story. Going back means going home: to Traverse City, to her mother, and to the lake where her younger sister Joncee drowned through the ice one Christmas when they were children.

Sonny has kept snow, Christmas, and the whole of that season at arm's length for decades. The new job leaves her nowhere to hide from any of it — not from a colleague determined to like her, not from a viewership that treats blizzards as a civic sport, and not from a grief that her family has never spoken about directly.

Viola Shipman (the pen name of Wade Rouse) writes warm Michigan-set fiction about family and place; The Secret of Snow is a Christmas-season novel about return and thaw rather than a mystery or a straight romance.