A Midnight Clear

Katherine Stone creates a captivating blend of wistful romance and thrilling intrigue with A Midnight Clear. When renowned trauma surgeon Jace Chandler encounters a painfully thin Julia Anne Hayley on a Christmastime flight to London, she is clutching a child's bedraggled, obviously well-loved stuffed rabbit. Julia has come to say good-bye to the ghosts of Christmases past while Jace is heading up a medical mission in a Balkan war zone to avoid confronting the Yuletide and the tormenting 20-year-old memories it holds. Thrown together in the midst of holiday chaos, Jace and Julia finally begin to heal themselves and each other. At the end of their six-day idyll, each carries part of the other--Jace has new, joyful memories of Christmas seen through Julia's violet eyes to help him through the atrocities of war, and Julia is pregnant with Jace's baby. A moving contemporary not to be missed. --Alison Trinkle