A Knights Bridge Christmas

Neggers’s fifth Swift River Valley contemporary (after Echo Lake) features widowed Claire Morgan, the new library director recently arrived in small Knights Bridge, Mass., with her six-year-old son, Owen. Busy ER doctor Logan Farrell visits from Boston to move his feisty grandmother, Daisy, into an assisted living facility. Claire sees Logan as “one of those imperious, successful men who likes to get his way,” but Daisy convinces Claire and Logan to decorate her home together “for one last Christmas.” Daisy’s cryptic request to put a candle in the window mystifies them, but readers will recognize it from the prologue, which reveals how 15-year-old Daisy fell in love with Logan’s grandfather. As mutual affection grows, Claire and Logan help each other navigate challenges: her anxiety for Owen’s safety, his desire to shake his reputation as work obsessed and neglectful of his family. Appealing protagonists, good neighbors, small-town Christmas traditions, and Neggers’s own recipes make for a fine romance. (Oct.)