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.