Finding Father Christmas

It's a week before Christmas. Miranda Chester, a stager with an interior design firm in Seattle, has avoided any personal sense of the season ever since her mother, Eve Chester--a stage actress and the only parent she ever knew in Eve never having divulged the identity of Miranda's father--died while performing on stage exactly 20 years ago when Miranda was only nine. Miranda's non-Christmas this year changes when she comes into possession of a long-forgotten suitcase that belonged to her mother. Three items hidden in the suitcase end up being what Miranda believes are clues to her father's identity--a bracelet with an angel charm which she does recognize as one of her mother's prized possessions; a theater playbill from San Francisco of her mother performing in The Tempest in the role of Miranda, that playbill dated nine months before this Miranda's birth; and a photograph of a man dressed as Santa Claus with a young boy on his lap, neither of whom she recognizes. These items make Miranda feel compelled to go to the town of Carlton Heath, Vermont. There, she meets two families, the Whitcombs and McAndricks, that may have some connection. Peter Whitcomb is like Miranda in being a theater brat, his long-deceased father, actor James Whitcomb, after whom the local theater is named. And Miranda ends up staying at the Carlton Heath Inn, owned and operated by husband and wife Andrew and Katherine McAndrick, who along with their son Ian McAndrick, a lawyer and third set of hands at the inn, help Miranda on her investigative work. For the first time in her adult life, Miranda makes a connection not only to Christmas with the McAndricks and Whitcombs but a human connection to Ian himself. But Miranda's connection to the McAndricks, the Whitcombs and Carlton Heath itself may take a turn when she believes she's discovered the mystery as to the identity of her father. —Huggo