Allison Brennan changed things again! Once again, the novel is not in entirety about Lucy Kincaid. Instead, Brennan gives us three novellas, each about 100 pages, that occur over three days in different locations. If you look at the cover above, you also see that there is a bonus 4th novella that was published before Cold Snap, but if you hate e-books (the only way Brennan releases one-off novellas), now you have it in paperback.

The first novella occurs a few days before Christmas. All the Kincaid children are going home to San Diego where their parents live, and it’s the first time all seven siblings will be reunited in decades. The first novella focuses on Patrick Kincaid, whom we’ve met many times. He was best friends and business partners with Lucy’s boyfriend, Sean, until Sean started dating Lucy. Patrick has a hard time reconciling the playboy Sean had been for years with the loving partner Lucy chose. Also, Sean quit RCK, the company Patrick co-owns, so they’re no longer partners.

Patrick has been sent by his mother to check on the neighbor’s daughter. It would be so simple if she lived next door, but she’s an adult, a lawyer, who won’t answer her mother’s phone calls. Patrick finds the “missing” adult, who is in the middle of a rescue mission to save a trafficked teen girl who has evidence that a local businessman is doing the trafficking. This first novella grated on me because the lawyer — Elle — is an idiot. She’s so passionate that she runs toward whatever she wants, even if it put her in danger. It’s like when someone runs dives into the ocean to save a drowning person after they’re told professional help is on the way, and now we have two people drowning. It looks like she’s going to stick around in future novels because Patrick has, like, never felt this way before about a woman.

Novella two is about Lucy and Sean, stuck near the Denver airport due to a snow storm (yay, the title makes sense!) en route to San Diego for that family Christmas. Much like a Murder She Wrote episode, our lead characters can’t go anywhere without stumbling over a dead body or three. Because the murder scene investigators can’t get there post haste due to the snow storm, Lucy, Sean, and Lucy’s sister-in-law (an FBI agent herself) investigate. We get tangled up in a stalking situation that resolves itself. Not super memorable, but I don’t think Allison Brennan’s strength is in novellas.

Lastly, the Kincaid children receive calls to come home for Christmas even faster because their father had a heart attack. In the hospital, the Kincaids are emotional over their stoic father, who used to be a military man, and want to support their mother, an immigrant from Cuba (and now we know who the parents are, finally). But another military man, this one on a mission, arrives at the hospital and takes hostages. He says the medical staff killed his sister, that she had cancer but was in remission, and one day at the hospital they gave her the wrong medicine, so now she’s dead. Lucy’s sister Carina sees the vet take hostages and gets herself inside the situation. Carina is a police officer and in her element, but she’s not a hostage negotiator . . . and she just crossed the line to safety with her pregnancy. Previous pregnancies all resulted in miscarriages. As you can imagine, emotions are high when Lucy is called in and Carina is let go. This is supposed to be the first time Sean meets the family, but how can he be happy when they all agreed that trading one Kincaid for another results in the love of his life in a room with a bomb? I found this novella the most interesting because the villain really wants answers about his sister’s death, and we are suspicious that something nefarious is happening at the hospital.

Another fun entry in the Lucy Kincaid books that does finally conclude at the family homestead in San Diego on Christmas, though I’ll be happy to get back to full-length novels.