I’ll admit that this month’s TBR Challenge theme was a tricky one. “New Year, Who Dis?” could be interpreted a few different ways. After overthinking for a while, I decided Irresistible Stranger by Jennifer Greene, published in January 2010, would fit the bill. It features a heroine returning to the childhood hometown she left at age 8, and a hero who is one of the few people who moved to town sometime after she’d left and therefore did not know her history. Each is trying to figure out how the other fits into this place to an extent, as well as solve a mystery (this is romantic suspense, after all.)

While this book is third in a trilogy, it stands on its own. The trilogy follows three sisters, and they all meet their matches in different places, so I didn’t feel like I was missing any backstory. The sister in this book, Lily Campbell, lost her parents in a house fire when she was 8. After the fire, she and her sisters were separated in foster care.  This book opens twenty years after the fire, and Lily has returned to Pecan Valley, Georgia, to try to figure out what happened. Town lore had it that her father was despondent over losing his job at the mill, and started the fire himself, but Lily just cannot reconcile that with the father she remembered.

I liked how the author portrayed Lily as she comes back to town. At home in Virginia, she teaches in a school for the gifted and when she talks about her work, she sounds very confident and in command of herself. However, the Lily that emerges in Pecan Valley has emotions flying all over the place. On the one hand, she’s building a comfortable acquaintance with the friendly owner of the B and B where she’s staying, but then she also sometimes feels uneasy in town because she knows the rumors and knows that not everyone welcomes her return.

In some ways that seems to make her friendship and quickly blossoming relationship with Griff Branchard make sense. Griff is laid-back and easy to talk to, and his ice cream parlor is an undemanding place to hang out. Griff clearly moved to town after Lily left, and so with him she has more of a clean slate than elsewhere in town. Griff came across as a fairly accepting person anyway, but he certainly didn’t meet Lily with any preconceived notions.

While I liked Lily and Griff as a couple, Griff’s backstory didn’t come to life as vividly as Lily’s. From what he confides in Lily, we learn that his home life growing up was unhappy, and it’s obvious that his ice cream shop isn’t all that he has going on in his life. We do find out Griff’s secrets throughout the story, but they get glossed over a bit. I got the feeling that the author wanted to keep the focus on Lily and the fire, and that perhaps she saw going too deeply into Griff’s life as a distraction. I understand why that decision may have been made, but I did feel that Griff was a little underdeveloped. He’s a perfect golden retriever of a hero when I wanted him to be more of a complex person.

The mystery threaded through the story is a bit over the top by the end, but definitely engaging. As Lily tries to figure out what really happened twenty years ago, someone is starting fires in town again. They are at locations connected to Lily, and that adds an air of tension to the story, as well as isolating Lily from some of the folks in town. I found myself drawn into the mystery until the very end, where the resolution just did not satisfy.

In a similar vein, I enjoyed the romance for most of the book. The initial flirtations at the ice cream store were fun, and I could buy the instalust between Lily and Griff. Likewise, I enjoyed seeing them join forces to look into the fires as they got to know one another better. My main beef with the romance was that, toward the end of the book, the pacing felt a bit off and it seemed like the author was rushing her characters along.

Even with those issues, I did still enjoy the book and I’d give it a qualified recommendation. I’d not read Jennifer Greene before, but I knew she had written many category romances, so I’m happy I gave one of her books a try.