🎧 Reviewed by LD | Rating: 4/5 | Steam: 🔥 | Standalone
⚠️ This is a full spoiler review. If you haven’t read Postmarked December yet — go read it first. We’ll be here when you’re done.
The Opening
Imagine your husband dies, and then months later you go to get the mail and there’s a letter sitting in a pretty envelope and it is apparently from him. And your immediate instinct is that someone is being monumentally cruel to you, which is an odd instinct to have, and that is the setup we are working with here. A Christmas romance about grief, a scavenger hunt from beyond the grave, and a man on a plane who may or may not be trustworthy.
The Full Story — Spoilers Included
Heather and the Letter
Heather is a widow. Her husband Toby was a successful musician who had a rapid decline and his death seemed to come out of nowhere for the public even though she had been living it up close the whole time. The press has now somehow gotten her number and won’t stop calling trying to get interviews or get her to attend award ceremonies on his behalf, and she just keeps blocking numbers because she is not interested in being the grieving widow for public consumption. Her friend Marianne has already clocked that she’s struggling and is on her way over, and you can tell right away that Marianne is one of those friends who hears it in your voice before you’ve said a single word about it.
And then Heather goes to get the mail. There is a pretty envelope. There is a letter that appears to be from Toby, referencing something specific that happened between them, and she panics and calls the post office because who wouldn’t. The postal worker tells her a man came in and arranged for it, specifically asked them to hold a message for a Heather and that if anyone called or came in, it would be her. The note inside tells her to go to a specific store and buy a bottle of wine, so she and Marianne go because at this point what else are you going to do, and the bottle at the wine shop is already paid for with a note attached leading her to the next stop. It’s a scavenger hunt, and once I understood what the book was doing with the premise I thought it was really sweet.
The Scavenger Hunt
The trail takes them to a tree lot, where a man hands her another envelope and then points to a white vehicle rushing away before she can see who it was, and inside the envelope is a plane ticket and a two-night stay at the hotel where she and Toby spent their first anniversary. Marianne immediately raises the concern that whoever booked the room has their name on it and therefore has access to the key, so Heather decides to go but books her own room under her own name, which is the smart call.
On the flight she ends up sitting next to Nick, who is chatty in a way that is a little more than she’s comfortable with, so she tells him she’s meeting someone. She runs into him again at the hotel restaurant, he calls her on it, she admits she lied, and somehow this turns into them actually spending time together for the rest of the trip and her feeling really guilty about enjoying herself. Which I understand completely because moving on from someone you loved is complicated and the guilt shows up whether you want it to or not.
She comes back to her hotel room one day to find a note sitting there, telling her that he got her the cider she had been trying to find so she wouldn’t have been able to track it down herself, and that he just wanted her to get out and see things, and that when she gets home there will be something waiting for her. She clocks that this means someone has been watching her closely enough to know she went looking for cider and came back empty-handed. They fly home together and exchange numbers at the airport.
Letters, Guilt, and a Cabin Full of Christmas
Heather is still keeping a journal where she writes to Toby, and in it she admits she has developed feelings for Nick. She messages him and he doesn’t respond, which bothers her enough that she decides to send another message. Heather started this story completely submerged in grief, and now she feels like every letter she receives just pulls her back into the sadness she was finally starting to climb out of. She doesn’t want to forget Toby, but she also just wants to move forward, and every clue arriving in her mailbox is making both of those things harder at the same time.
The next letter sends her to the family cabin Toby always wanted to return to after the renovations but never got the chance to see, and when she gets there it is completely ready for Christmas. Gifts, stockings, food, the whole thing. Christmas morning she is still sitting with the fact that Nick has not answered her in any capacity, and both she and Marianne start to wonder whether any of this was actually ever Toby’s doing at all. What if it’s a stranger, a stalker? What if it’s someone who fixated on her?
The three Christmas gifts she finds are: new music Toby recorded, left up to her whether it ever gets released into the world; his recipes, which she had always wanted and never had; and a photo album with another note inside. And in the middle of all of this, she starts hoping that Nick is somehow the one who has been orchestrating the notes, which she herself acknowledges would be a strange thing for her husband to arrange, putting a stranger in the middle of all of this. But she has decided after two days that Nick is the type to do a grand romantic gesture, and I have to say: lady. You met this man for a weekend!! You don’t know what he is the type to do.
The Problem with Nicholas Monroe
Then a reporter calls. Someone commissioned a full autobiography on Toby, his wife, and his illness and paid fifty thousand dollars for it, and the author is Nicholas Monroe. The chatty man from the plane who said he was in marketing research. She feels played, thinks maybe he was only ever there to get information from her and that the number he gave her was wrong, that none of it was real.
And then she tracks him down to his house, sees him getting his mail, and notices he drives a white suburban. The same white vehicle from the tree lot. So now she has to reckon with the possibility that Nick arranged this entire thing and Toby was never involved at all.
She storms in and confronts him. He tells her he never got her messages, and then she realizes: she had previously gotten a call from an unsaved number relentlessly trying to reach her, assumed it was a reporter, hung up, and blocked it. That was Nick. She blocked him herself by accident, without knowing it. I really liked this as a resolution because it came from her own completely reasonable behavior throughout the book and not from some manufactured miscommunication, which made it feel consistent with who she actually is as a character.
She tells him she knows about the fifty thousand dollars. He says he was offered that amount but did not accept it, that he only took enough to cover his actual expenses. He admits all the notes were in his handwriting, not Toby’s, and that he arranged everything. She is furious because Toby had told her she would be the one to decide when or if any of this got shared with the world. Nick tells her he knows Toby would have been fine with it, hints that he can’t say who told him that, and lets her know the book is already written and already in print because he finished it six months ago. She leaves. He asks her to at least unblock him. He also can’t tell her anything until New Years.
He sends flowers. She waits. The day before New Year’s Eve she decides that if she’s ever going to get the actual truth she needs to unblock him, so she does.
New Year’s Eve
He calls the next morning, excited about the unblock. She tells him it’s New Year’s Eve and she wants answers now. He says he can’t tell her yet, but there will be a pair of shoes and a dress on her doorknob and he will pick her up that evening and explain everything.
He takes her to dinner, she’s still angry and feeling like she was betrayed, and then he tells her the actual truth: the anonymous person behind all of it was Toby. It was always Toby. Nick had met Toby before he died, and Toby had trusted him enough to hand over documents for safekeeping, ask him to write his story, and specifically ask Nick to take care of Heather. Nick was carrying out what Toby had planned. He gives her the book, which is Toby’s love story to her, and tells her the final decision about whether it ever goes out into the world belongs entirely to her.
She kisses him.
The following Christmas: she and Nick are together, Marianne is pregnant, everything resolves cleanly and happily, and we are done.
The Steam Rating Breakdown
This is a flat 🔥 with no steam at all. This is a sweet Christmas romance built around grief, healing, and a very elaborate plan from a dead man, and there is zero spice anywhere in it. If you are coming in looking for heat, this is not the book.
The Ending Explained — Satisfied or Disappointed?
Satisfied. The reveal that Toby was behind everything and Nick was simply his chosen person is a solid payoff, the blocking mix-up is a clever resolution that feels consistent with how Heather has been behaving from the start, and the New Year’s Eve dinner scene delivers the emotional resolution the story was building toward. It is warm and tidy and wraps up cleanly, which is exactly what a Christmas romance should do.
Would I Reread It?
No. This is a read-it-once, feel-good holiday book and that is perfectly fine. You get the feelings, you get the catharsis, you get the happily ever after.
Who Is This For
If you want a Christmas romance that leans into grief and moving forward, a scavenger hunt premise that is more emotionally layered than it sounds, and a clean happily ever after with zero steam, this is a really solid pick. It reads fast, it’s cozy, and it will give you all the holiday feelings.
Note: I received an advance reader copy of this book via NetGalley.
Where to Get This Book
📖 Physical Book
Amazon US | Amazon CA | Bookshop.org
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Plot Twisted. 🔥
🎧 | Standalone | Genre: Christmas Romance | Steam: 🔥
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