Gloria

Christmas and ice cream, a match made in Hamlet.

Great Aunt Patti is dead.

Gloria Watson would probably feel a little sadder at that news if she had known about Great Aunt Patti in the first place. Growing up an only child, all she had was her grandmother. After Nana’s passing, Gloria thought she was the last one left in her family.

Well, she is. Since Great Aunt Patti is dead and all.

That’s okay. The nice lawyer who wrote her a letter assured Gloria that her great aunt lived a long, happy life in a small town that Gloria has never heard of. And now, as her next of kin, everything she owned belongs to Gloria.

Including a house. Which sounds like a godsend to Gloria, who is eager to start her dream business and could use the extra cash.

Only there’s a catch. Because of course there is. 

The house is hers—but only after she lives there for a year. One year in Hamlet and then Gloria will have enough money to follow her dream. Why not? It’ll give her time to work on her flavors. And it wasn’t like she had much going on for her in the city anyway.

She’s moved in by Thanksgiving, ready to spend the holidays in her new home.

So what if her new neighbor is the hottest guy she’s ever seen? Franklin is as grumpy as he is handsome, and he hates Christmas.

Seriously.

A year? Gloria will be lucky if she makes it to January.

* Gloria is a small town Christmas romance set in Hamlet! It’s not explicitly part of the Hamlet series and for two reasons: the timeline and how different in tone it’s going to be compared to the other (darker, more suspenseful) books. Gloria will be a sweet, low-stakes, fluffy romance, similar to Hallmark Christmas movies, though it will feature characters and settings from the Hamlet books. You don't have to be familiar with those books to read this book—it's definitely a stand-alone—but it's also a bit of a prequel to that series, set a couple of years before the first Hamlet book Don't Trust Me.