Christmas in July (But Make It DARK)

I decided to fully embrace Christmas in July this year. I have some book recs for you, but before we get to those I need to take a second to explain this year’s theme. Because it’s a little…dark.

The month is blocked off to pen my own holiday romance novel (That Boy, coming in November, mark your calendar). But, if you’re at all familiar with my books you’ll know that the task of writing romance novels is seldom straightforward with me.

I did, after all, set out to write simple, feel-good contemporary romance, and wound up penning romantic suspense that included death and mystery in every book.

So when the Christmas in July vibe took me I was like “Okay, let’s do Christmas in July! Everyone loves romantic Christmas books! But let’s make it DARK. And twisted. Just for fun.”

In other words, I set out to write a festive romance. But, in true me fashion, it turned into a dark, high-heat love story. One with a secret identity, emotional damage, and more than a little snow-dusted yearning, fuelled by that ineffable tension between seasonal good cheer, Christmas spirit, and the creeping sense that for all the tinsel and cheer, you’re mostly just sad and alone.

You know. Christmas.

Prepare to meet a pair of lonely souls who always desperately yearn to enjoy the holidays, but somehow never quite manage to do it.

Until this year.

Maybe.

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What Is Christmas In July?

For the uninitiated, Christmas in July is exactly what it sounds like; a mid-year excuse to indulge in festive cheer while it’s sweltering outside (and it is currently scorching, even in England).

Christmas in July is a growing trend on Bookstagram and BookTok, and across book clubs, streaming platforms, and even gift-giving events. And I have to admit, this was fully a ‘Bookstagram made me do it!’ thing. Never in a million years would I have considered allowing Christmas to spill over into July, if not for the influence of Bookstagrammers.

Think of it as a second, cooler (ironically) Christmas, perfect for tinsel, fairy lights, and (if you’re bookishly inclined) holiday-themed reading lists. Speaking of which…

Christmas In July Books To Sink Your Teeth Into

My own twisted Christmas romance novel is now well underway (more on that in a minute), but if you’re doing Christmas in July and fancy a few darker reads and a bit more suspense or angst in your egg nog, feast your eyes on these beauties…

The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year by Ally Carter

A locked-room mystery. A poison garden. A sleigh-load of secrets. Two rival mystery authors. One isolated estate. A vanished hostess. This murder-mystery-with-mistletoe delivers banter, tension, and just enough festive flair to balance the body count.

Think: snowy manor house, suspiciously charming men, and a heroine trying not to fall for someone who might be a killer. A perfect pick for those who like their holiday stories with a bit more bite.

The Takedown by Carlie Walker

Enemies to lovers… with espionage and festive cocktails. CIA operative Sydney Swift is used to danger, not Christmas. But when she goes undercover to investigate her sister’s fiancé over the holidays, she’s forced to fake-date the one man who sees through her: Nick, a bodyguard with secrets of his own.

It’s sharp, sexy, and absolutely bingeable. Full of banter, action, and just enough holiday glitter to keep things festive without getting saccharine. If your idea of a cosy Christmas is more Mission: Impossible with a Santa hat, grab this.

Her Secret Christmas Agent by Geri Krowtow

Undercover, under the mistletoe. When a cult targets her school, undercover officer Nika Baklanov poses as a teacher, only to find herself working with former marine Mitch Everlock. They both have something to hide… and something very real to lose.

A tight romantic suspense set against a snowstorm and high-stakes threats, this delivers on action and emotional connection. The Christmas angle is subtle but sincere, and the love story still finds time to sparkle through the tension.

A Vampire’s Christmas Carol by Cynthia Eden

Because even undead Scrooges deserve a shot at love. Ben Hanson is a vampire haunted by his past. Literally. On Christmas Eve, he’s visited by three not-so-ghostly figures who force him to confront the choices he’s made, and what he could still salvage. Among those choices? The woman he once loved and lost.

This one’s moody, dramatic, and emotionally indulgent in the way only paranormal holiday romances can be. If you like your Christmas stories dark, dangerous, and full of teeth (but still sweet at the centre), this novella hits all the marks.

Just Like Magic by Sarah Hogle

Chaotic good, campy holiday magic, and gleeful emotional sabotage. Bettie’s life is a mess. She’s pretending to be rich on Instagram, she’s alone for Christmas, and she just accidentally summoned the literal embodiment of holiday spirit. Hall (yes, as in Deck the…) is infuriatingly cheerful and dangerously powerful.

Naturally, she starts to fall for him.

This book is unhinged in the best way: it’s magical realism, romantic comedy, and millennial burnout all rolled into one. It absolutely captures that feeling of wanting to feel festive and just… not.

Until someone annoyingly magical makes it impossible not to.

Season of Love by Helena Greer

Grumpy meets sunshine, with grief, Judaism, and a Christmas tree farm. When Miriam Blum inherits a Christmas tree farm after her beloved great-aunt’s death, she has to return to a place filled with bittersweet memories. She didn’t expect to fall for the tree farm manager—who’s gorgeous, gruff, and absolutely not looking for love.

This is queer romance wrapped in grief, complicated family, and the hope that maybe the holidays don’t have to hurt quite so much. It’s warm, inclusive, and a quiet celebration of choosing joy anyway. The perfect read for anyone who needs to cry a little before they smile.

The Afterlife of Holly Chase by Cynthia Hand

A snarky ghost gets a second shot at Christmas. Holly Chase is a former Scrooge. She was visited by three ghosts. She ignored them. Then she died. Now she works for a secret organisation called Project Scrooge, playing the Ghost of Christmas Past for other misanthropes. But this year’s target throws her jaded afterlife into chaos.

This one’s a gorgeously strange holiday tale: part Dickens retelling, part redemption arc, and part twisted workplace romance. It’s sharp, reflective, and soaked in existential cheer. If your inner teen goth also longs for someone to break through your emotional armour with Christmas spirit, this one’s for you.

A Holiday by Gaslight by Mimi Matthews

Victorian restraint, candlelit longing, and class tension in corsets.
When Sophie, the daughter of a gentleman fallen on hard times, becomes engaged to the wealthy but emotionally unreadable Mr Edward Sharpe, she soon realises money won’t make up for affection. She breaks things off… only to discover that Edward might not be as cold as he seems.

This is a novella drenched in snow, propriety, and aching silences—a slow-burn Christmas romance for fans of simmering glances across candlelit parlours. It delivers all the nostalgia and wistfulness of a Charles Dickens setting but with a solid, swoony payoff. Pure gloamas: yearning, melancholy, and a subtle promise that love might just be enough.

So, What Drove Me To Do Christmas In July This Year?

Actually, this is kind of a funny story. Not so much for my cover artist (sorry, Tim!), but my current WIP has been planned for a while now. Actually, I have the next several novels in The Cheshire Set fully planned and mapped out. So much so that Tim (my long-suffering and highly talented cover artist) had the next three on the books to do this year. He’d been briefed, they were booked in, That Boy was the next one up and originally intended to be a novella coming out in August, featuring two of the minor characters in Nightshade.

Slight aside: if you’ve not read Nightshade yet, knowing who those two characters are is a bit of a spoiler, so you might want to go read that, then come back and read the rest of this! Not essential, all books in this series do work as standalone novels. However, Nightshade kicks off the Delaware Grange arc that will span several books, and I do recommend reading the books in that arc in publication order.

Anyway, my end of year release for 2025 was then supposed to be Claimed, a spicy bodyguard romance featuring Clara and Nate (also minor characters in Nightshade, though not part of the Delaware Grange arc). With a full-length novel, That Man (third book in the DG arc), following on from That Boy next year.

So those were the three covers Tim had in mind, fully briefed.

Then Nightshade was released at the end of June, and I took a couple of weeks off to recover.

Naturally in addition to doing a lot of reading during that time, I also started writing the next book. Because…well it was meant to be out in August, I had to get a draft to my editor by mid-July to make that happen, and I hadn’t actually started it yet.

As is often the case, once I started writing, the damn thing got away from me.

The plot escalated quite extensively, and went from being the single POV tale of how Sofia had a secret spring romance to a dual POV romp through the realms of dark romantic suspense, secret identity, and very high spice.

Oops.

The complete change also led to a fit of pathetic fallacy-driven pique that moved the timing of the novel to late November and December. And because I was doing Christmas in July this year, and started reading a ton of festive holiday reads, I also wound up working in Christmas. And the seemingly endless run up weeks where everywhere you look is glistening with seasonal cheer and festive wonder.

Fabulous.

Unless you’re of a slightly gloomy persuasion, lonely, or wrestling with any kind of existential crisis.

Which, apparently, every single person at Delaware Grange is, in one way or another.

So, we went from a spring-time high spice sexy romance to a Christmas themed romance that’s arguably even higher spice and a little bit dark and twisty. The downside for poor Tim being that the cover he was pretty much finished on with a beautiful wisteria border, and to be completely redone into a cover that matched the Glomas vibe I invented.

But the whole Gloamas thing will take a little more explaining…

‘Twas The Gloam Before Christmas…

I love Christmas. It’s a magical time of the year. The decorations, twinkling lights, Hygge vibes, curling up with a hot chocolate and the latest cosy christmas mystery.

But Christmas can also be a very dark time.

For me. For a lot of people. There’s the literal darkness that comes with the onslaught of winter – I get Seasonal Affective Disorder, SAD, so this really hits me hard. But there’s also this overwhelming pressure around the holidays. To be happy. To be joyful. To be with friends, family, someone you love.

Christmas takes on a very different tone when you have anything negative going on in your life at the time. You often want to be merry and bright, but you’re not. And everyone around you expects you to be. And the more you try to be, the worse you end up feeling.

I love a good Christmas romance novel as much as the next gal, but I’ve often felt they lack the nuance of the real human experience around the holidays. Some of them, to be sure, include explorations of loneliness and how people struggle around the holidays. And I appreciate that.

But the Christmas tales I love the most are those of complete transformation. Of hope. The ones that say even the darkest, saddest, most desperate of souls can find love and joy at Christmas.

That is, afterall, what made A Christmas Carol a beloved favourite that we’re still reading, watching and retelling nearly two hundred years later.

A dark Christmas romance, that’s what I wanted to write.

The second I introduced Matt’s POV to this book it was bound to get dark and twisty (IYKYK). But I really wanted both characters to encapsulate this feeling I have every year of…desperately yearning for Christmas, only to have all the snow-laced trees and sparkling lights and candlelit parties and bedecked trees to feel…flat.

Gloamas was born.

This is a running gag in the book (I won’t say too much to avoid spoilers), but the gist of it is that Sofia experiences the gloaming in the run up to Christmas. The overwhelming dread and simultaneous longing for Christmas that sees her getting decorations up on the 1st of November every year, just to eke out as much joy as she possibly can from the season.

Only to find herself viewing it all with a weird, cynical sadness, because she knows come Christmas morning she’ll be alone.

Matt has a similar sentiment where Christmas is concerned. He’s spent his whole life enthusiastically joining in the merrymaking, but somehow the magic you’re supposed to feel has never quite found him.

So yes, this is a high spice Christmas romance novel you’ll devour for all the intrigue and mystery and picturesque Christmas magic.

But it’s also the tale of two people who’ve always loved the season, but are somehow let down by it every year. And every year that grows a little more devastating.

Until they find each other.

Mark Your Calendar: That Boy is Coming

When you’re done with the Christmas in July recs, you should be very ready to read my own moody little festive secret come November. That Boy is my upcoming twisted Christmas romance novel and it has everything you could possibly want from a festive read: forbidden love, secret identities, the cutest manifestation of seasonal depression you will ever witness, some decidedly unhinged festive cheer, and one very large gaudy reindeer.

You’ll laugh, you’ll ache, and you’ll probably want to spend Christmas wrapped in fairy lights with someone you know is about to wreck you, and you’re happy to let them do it.