I read Lisa Kleypas's Christmas Eve at Friday Harbor over the holidays and enjoyed it. It was a fairly typical contemporary romance, and the male protagonist had two brothers who were just as cynical about love as he was, a dead giveaway for a trilogy, and since I thought the youngest brother was especially interesting, I sought out the other books.
Rainshadow Road is the second in the series, about the middle brother and a glass artist he falls in love with. Kleypas veered away from the contemporary romance category to add touches of magic realism: Lucy's glass creations come to life when she feels a strong emotion, and Sam, a vintner, could talk to plants. It was fine, and I liked the complicated relationship Lucy had with her family (although problems were resolved too quickly), but I would have appreciated more of a commitment to the magic realism, one of my favorite genres.
Maybe the third book, Dream Lake, would do more? Nope -- this one was a straight-up ghost story. Alex, the brother that intrigued me, is haunted by a ghost who needs to resolve a mistake from his past involving the love of his live, conveniently a relative of the chef Alex falls in love with (who can manipulate emotions somewhat with her cooking, like a lesser Tita from Como agua para chocolate). Unfortunately, the ghost's story (har) took away from the character development I wanted to see with Alex.
Not content to stop with a trilogy around the three brothers, Kleypas wrote a fourth novel, this one a paranormal romance. Justine, Zoe's employer, is a witch who learns she was long ago cursed to never find love; Jason is a tech bro (ugh) with no soul ( ... ) looking for a way to solve his predicament. This was the weakest of the lot, because the two fell in love way too quickly (although I appreciated the way they communicated straighforwardly) and because the central conflict didn't make a whole lot of sense. The curse and its attendant reversal and correction was needlessly complicated, and Jason lacking a soul didn't seem to matter too much in the end. For one thing, he could live without a soul, and make moral (or not) decisions; we were told there would be no afterlife for him without one, but no one seemed too concerned about that.
Kleypas has said she is contemplating a fifth novel in the series, presumably about Jason's assistant Priscilla who comes from a family of witches whose husbands all die early deaths. I look forward to seeing what sub-genre she tackles next!
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