A Snowbound Scandal

Jessica Lemmon writes contemporary romance with the kind of warmth and easy humor that makes her books a regular fixture on the Harlequin Desire and Forever Romance lists. Over the course of more than thirty novels she has built up a steady audience for her stories about wealthy heroes, complicated families, and women who do not let themselves be steamrolled by either.

A Snowbound Scandal slots into the trapped together subgenre that romance readers know and love. A snowstorm, a remote location, two people with history and unresolved feelings, and the forced proximity does the rest of the work. Lemmon is good at this kind of setup because she takes the time to make her characters’ resistance to each other believable. They have reasons to keep their distance, and the storm just happens to be louder than those reasons. By the time the heat actually arrives, the reader has been earning it alongside the characters.

Lemmon’s prose is light and quick. She does not write the longest books in the genre but she packs a lot of emotional turn into the pages she uses. Her heroes tend to be successful men with one specific blind spot the heroine is going to expose, and her heroines are usually competent women dealing with one specific situation that is about to fall apart. The combination is reliable in the best sense.

For readers who enjoy Sarah Morgan’s holiday romances, Maisey Yates’s small town novels, or Jules Bennett’s contemporary work, Jessica Lemmon is squarely in the same neighborhood. A Snowbound Scandal is a comfortable, well crafted entry into her catalogue.