Chasing Christmas Eve by Jill Shalvis

Chasing Christmas Eve
by Jill Shalvis [Shalvis] 

Every year, I make it a tradition to read one Christmas Mystery and one Christmas Romance in December — Chasing Christmas Eve was my selection for December 2017. I had never read any novels by Jill Shalvis previously, and discovered with this one that I was jumping into the middle of a series — Heartbreaker Bay — set in San Francisco. In this nominally-holiday-themed entry, best-selling Young Adult fantasy author Colbie Albright has run away from her high-pressure life in New York City, hoping to escape to a Caribbean island. A hurricane changes her plans and she ends up in San Francisco. An accident with a large dog and a fountain ends up with her meeting inventor and businessman Spence Baldwin. Circumstances allow for her to rent an apartment in Spence’s combined business/apartment building, and despite the fact that both of them have secrets that they don’t want to share, they bond as Colbie decompresses from her life of deadlines and Spence begins to make progress on a critical technology job he’s committed to finish.

The romance verges from sweet and simple to hot and steamy, like a pinball bouncing around a pinball machine, but the characters are likeable — even if you want to yell at them to share their secrets and not be so repressed. Having visited San Francisco before, I appreciated the travelogue as Spence helps Colbie check off the items on her “travel to-do list”. The other supporting characters were also likeable — most have had their own “how we met” novels in the series already, and I enjoyed this enough to also read a Christmas novella by Shalvis, Holiday Wishes, set shortly after Chasing Christmas Eve, and focused on two of the others in this series’ large cast. That novella felt a little rushed, and I don’t necessarily recommend it, but Chasing Christmas Eve was an enjoyable enough piece of romantic fluff.

[If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Holiday Wishes, also by Jill Shalvis, or any of the other volumes in her popular Heartbreaker Bay series.]

[ official Chasing Christmas Eve page on the official Jill Shalvis web site ]

Recommended by Scott C.
Bennett Martin Public Library

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