Winter in Paradise by Elin Hilderbrand

 Irene is spending New Year's Day alone because her affectionate but often absent husband is away again for work. Then she receives a call that he has been killed in a helicopter crash. She calls her two grown sons and together they rush to the Caribbean island of St John.  There they discover that their father/husband owns a villa where he kept a young local woman for company, who was also killed in the same accident.  As they piece together the mystery of their fathers/husband's death, they start to be charmed by the local culture, and people. Abandoning the search for truth, they instead each go on the hunt for romance and companionship.

This book was recommended to be by one of my patrons, but I will admit that I only got through 4/5th of it.  It was not only too spicy for my taste, but I also realized that all the main characters where pretty shallow and I didn't really like any of them. Even though I was mildly interested in what actually happened to the husband (it was clear that he wasn't really dead, but that he had faked his death to get out of some kind of trouble with the law), the author wasn't focusing on the mystery at all, but instead on how quickly the mother and both brothers (one of which was married with a child) abandoned their whole prior life to go chasing after people they had just met. Maybe if I had spent the final two hours to see how it turned out I might have liked it better, but after I had to skip several steamy pages a second time, I decided it wasn't worth it. Sorry, Ms Hilderbrand, you are going on my "Authors to avoid" list. (2019, 336 p)