Susan Wiggs is continuing her Lakeshore Chronicles, set in the small-Upstate New York town of Avalon with her newest story, Fireside. It’s a solid addition to the series that revisits a number of favorite characters.

Bo Crutcher is an unlikely major league rookie, but at 30, he’s been drafted to play for the Yankees. It seems like everything from then on will be smooth sailing into the big time, but then everything changes; his twelve-year-old son has to come stay with him. They’ve never met (as demanded by the child’s mother), so the connection Bo has with AJ is through support checks and gifts he’s sent over the years. AJ’s mother, though, has been caught up in an immigration raid, and stuck in a detention center until she can sort out her citizenship. It’s under these circumstances that Bo and AJ finally meet.

They stay at a boarding house in Avalon, owned by Kim Van Dorn’s mother. Kim is a media trainer and publicist for athletes, who has come home from LA after a very public, very bad break-up with one of her clients. Though she never wants to get involved with athletes again, she finds herself drawn to Bo and his son. As it becomes clear that AJ needs all the stability possible, Bo decides to stick around Avalon instead of going off to “Fame Camp” – so he enlists Kim to train him to deal with the media. Their mutual attraction flourishes, but the situation with AJ’s mom becomes more complicated and threatens their future.

On the surface, Bo could be unlikable; after all, he was absent from his child’s life for twelve years. But the author makes it clear that this was not by choice, and as a result, he is more sympathetic. He makes another potentially controversial choice at the end of the book; I have a feeling what he does could be either loved or hated by readers, but I’m in the former category. That isn’t to say I loved the ending, though; it actually was the weakest part of the book, due to its abruptness that didn’t really address any of the issues that arose in the book, and which skimmed over a number of important things.

I found Bo’s character to be a tiny bit contradictory; he was both a love-em-and-leave-em ladies’ man, but also a man who truly loved and enjoyed women. I don’t consider them the same, and there were two lines in the book that showed their difference, as well. This wasn’t really a big deal – it’s not like the author tried to make him an honorable paragon who just happened to have one-night stands on a regular basis – but it still felt a little bit incongruous to me. Kim was a more even character, and one I really liked. She was, in my opinion, the perfect combination of spice and sweetness in a heroine, and I loved her interactions with both AJ and her mother.

Though Bo’s connection to the original set of characters in the Lakeshore Chronicles is tenuous (he plays in a band with the hero of the last book, Snowfall at Willow Lake, though I don’t remember his existence at all), we still manage to see a number of the regulars, which I enjoyed. It’s not necessary to have read the previous books, and the revisiting is minimal. There’s also an ongoing story that is developed a bit more here; I really hope Ms. Wiggs follows up with a book on this relationship, because I love those characters.

Really, if the ending just had a bit more to it and Bo’s characterization had been a bit more developed, this book might have reached DIK status; unfortunately, it just glossed over everything and dropped off at the end. It was still a very enjoyable book, though, and just about everything leading up to the conclusion was done right.