June 7th, 2025
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Sunshine, secrets, and swoon-worthy stories—June's featured reads are your perfect summer escape.

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He doesn�t need a woman in his life; she knows he can�t live without her.


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A promise rekindled. A secret revealed. A second chance at the family they never had.


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A cowboy with a second chance. A waitress with a hidden gift. And a small town where love paints a brand-new beginning.


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She�s racing for a prize. He�s dodging romance. Together, they might just cross the finish line to love.


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She steals from the mob for justice. He�s the FBI agent who could take her down�or fall for her instead.


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He�s her only protection. She�s carrying his child. Together, they must outwit a killer before time runs out.


One Snowy Night

One Snowy Night, March 2021
Sweet Home, Alaska #1
by Patience Griffin

Berkley
Featuring: Hope McKnight; Donovan Stone
336 pages
ISBN: 0593101472
EAN: 9780593101476
Kindle: B089S7C65N
Mass Market Paperback / e-Book
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"An isolated Alaskan town tries to reinvent itself, one store at a time"

Fresh Fiction Review

One Snowy Night
Patience Griffin

Reviewed by Clare O'Beara
Posted June 2, 2025

Romance Contemporary

Sweet Home, Alaska is a series about a town with a population under 600 and the setting for a romance with a positive thinking ethos. There is only one general store left and the hardware store closed, along with the tourist lodge outside town. ONE SNOWY NIGHT brought a tragedy that split families and friends.

 

Hope McKnight lives here, in a town she once hoped to escape, with her seventeen-year-old daughter Ella. Of course, Hope loves Ella, but being a single mom is hard, with scarce resources. Discovering that she was expecting straight after high school put an end to her thoughts of college. Now she lives in fear of Ella making the same mistakes. While Hope is working in the store she hears that Donovan Stone is coming back to town. 

 

Donovan, who arrives with his business manager Rick Miller, has inherited the hardware store and lodge. Rather than leave them to decay further, he intends to clean them up for sale in spring. A local dog breeder hands him a gift of Boomer, a Bernese Mountain Dog puppy. But he doesn’t intend to stay, and he’s not sure if Boomer will take to Florida. The only person available to help him tidy is Hope, who needs another job.

 

Eighteen years ago, when Donovan and Hope were dating, a car accident killed his brother and her sister. Saying things he didn’t intend, the young man left town and joined the Marines. Hope went to live with a relative and later arrived back at Sweet Home to raise her daughter, never telling anyone the truth. I think it would not be hard to guess, and someone would have got word to the Stone family. 

 

For a story supposedly about new brooms and quilting bees, we get more mentions of the word alcohol than could be expected. Hope scolds Ella for drinking, but never tries to hold the adult giving her wine responsible. And a teen girl drinking could be taken advantage of in other ways. Donovan has battled his predilections for years, and now asks a dry town to approve a wine event – why couldn’t he go with a baking event? I also don’t see why Hope never asked for child support. Donovan is comfortably off now, but only because he didn’t have to raise and educate Ella. Hope probably wouldn’t say it was to keep Ella poor and cold and shabby, but that is the result. Sprucing up the lodge is good fun, and everyone wants to see improvements. Patience Griffin has tried to keep a light touch, but I could have done without talking to ghosts. ONE SNOWY NIGHT will be followed by more stories about returnees to this isolated northern town.

Learn more about One Snowy Night

SUMMARY

A woman struggling to raise her daughter alone in a small Alaskan town finds her simple existence upended when the father of her child returns. . . .
 
Sweet Home, Alaska, was once a thriving, idyllic town, where A Stone's Throw Hardware and Haberdashery and the Sisterhood of the Quilt were the cornerstones of the community. Then, in one fatal moment, two young lives were cut short, and everything changed. Now the Stone family businesses have closed, the diner is in the red, and the population has dwindled to 573.
 
After the tragic accident that took her sister's life, Hope McKnight discovered she was pregnant, and gave up her dreams of college to raise her daughter. When Donovan Stone returns to sell his family's properties and to cut final ties with Sweet Home, he's shocked to find Hope still there--and a single mother. The pull between Hope and Donovan is as powerful as ever. But so are the secrets and lies stemming from that long-ago tragedy. Will they be able to overcome the past, or will the heartbreak of bygone days destroy their love again?


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