The Gift of the Inn (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781939023872)

Christmas Eve is a less than festive time for innkeeper Naomi Lockhart. It's been especially hard since they restored her parents' Colorado boarding house and turned it into a charming inn. Seventeen years before, tragedy struck them there on Christmas Eve, when their baby girl was kidnapped. Now, memories echo with every step Naomi takes around the inn. She tries to hold it together for their other daughters and take comfort in a husband stationed Stateside as war rages around the world in 1944, but will this be the Christmas that breaks her?

Gracie brushed aside comments about how little she resembled her parents for most of her life without really understanding why they made her feel so odd. A slip of the tongue by her grandmother, however, brings the discovery that the people who raised her are not her birth parents and acts as a catalyst for the start of a search for her real identity. After a whirlwind romance with a young, Europe-bound GI and subsequent elopement in defiance of her affluent, traditional parents, Gracie flees Texas for Colorado, following one of the few clues that she has about her real identity.

She finds herself alone and working as a waitress in blizzard-prone Colorado Springs, Colorado at the end of her pregnancy. Snowbound, she struggles to bring her child into the world as she becomes ever more confident that the innkeeper from across the road, who acts as a midwife of necessity, may hold the answers she seeks. Meanwhile, her wounded husband desperately tries to reach her side.

Set against the backdrop of the Second World War, this final novel from beloved writer Golden Keyes Parsons is an engaging story of love, loss, and reunion.