"Silent Night; Holy Night" by Colleen Coble

Because I enjoyed All is Calm; All is Bright so much last month, I thought I would try Colleen Coble's other Christmas novella duology too.  And now I have a conundrum: do I keep this paperback because I really liked one of the stories, or do I put it in the Little Free Library I steward because I didn't like the other story?  Ahhh, the troubles a bookworm faces, eh?

Silent Night is part of the Rock Harbor series set in Michigan's Upper Peninsula.  I lived in Michigan's Thumb for nine years as a kid and visited the UP several times, so I really loved the setting for this story.  I also enjoyed that it wasn't about two people falling in love, but about a husband-and-wife team of search-and-rescue people who live in a lighthouse.  It's all about a skydiver who dies and turns out to have had ties to a recent kidnapping.  I very much liked this story and would like to read the series at some point.

Holy Night is part of the Aloha Reef series set in Hawaii.  The setting was really fascinating, since I've never been to Hawaii, but I didn't like the characters very well, and you know that is make-or-break for me.  The main character, Kaia, kept refusing to trust her fiance with Extremely Important Information.  Over and over.  And did her fiance decide maybe this was a reason to reevaluate whether or not they should get married?  No, he was all focused on feeling abandoned and emotionally discarded.  Plus, he seemed to mostly love Kaia because she was hawt -- he kept focusing on their upcoming wedding night rather on the way she was not being a particularly sensible or trustworthy person. I would not have finished reading this novella except that I really loved Kaia's sister Eva, a young woman with Down Syndrome who gets kidnapped.  I very much needed to know if she got through this okay, so I kept reading.

So, now I just have to decide if I should keep this because I probably would like to reread Silent Night at some point, or if I should not.  Sigh.  Maybe I will keep it until I get a chance to read more of the Rock Harbor series, and then decide.

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-13 for kidnappings, characters in danger, and a some intense kissing and mildly suggestive content.  No on-page smut.

This is my fifth book read for the Literary Christmas reading challenge and my 61st for #TheUnreadShelfProject2022.