Sunshine on Thin Ice

The road across the lake is marked with dead Christmas trees. June Pellerin, a quick-smiling estate appraiser from Thornbury and Vane, has twelve days to inventory a tall white farmhouse on remote Gullrock Island before the trucks arrive and the sale begins in Minneapolis. What the file called "may be present on the property" turns out to be Callum, a large, silent, ice-eyed man splitting wood on the porch, one of the heirs, who has no intention of letting her inside. His enormous, gray-muzzled dog adores her on sight. Callum does not. As the days on the island go by, June discovers that the house holds more than furniture, and that the warmth she has always used as a professional smile might be the real thing. Sunshine on Thin Ice is a slow-burn, closed-door contemporary romance about grief, home, a grumpy man, a sunny woman, and the risk of trusting ground that may not hold.