The setup is the strongest thing about it. Taran is not a doormat, she is a woman who has made peacekeeping into a skill and is finally discovering the bill, and Nolan is a genuinely funny wrecking ball who is clear-eyed about it from the start. The combination works because neither of them is the cure for the other: he does not fix her, he just refuses to let her keep performing, which is a much more interesting dynamic than the genre usually allows.

And the setting does real work. Kringletown has been the point of the series from the first book, a place where the neighbours have opinions and the traditions have rules, and a staycation premise means the characters cannot leave when things get awkward. Trapping everybody in the same town for Christmas is a simple trick and it pays off, because every scene has an audience and every secret has to be carried past the same six people.

The fake engagement is well handled for a trope this old. The lies accumulate instead of vanishing, the family pressure is drawn with some affection rather than as a villain, and the ex is a real complication rather than a plot device who gets shoved into a taxi in chapter four. There is a sequence in the middle involving a public version of the engagement that I will not spoil, and it is the kind of scene this series exists to deliver.

What the series does better than most holiday romances is the family. They are not obstacles to be overcome before the couple can be happy, they are the reason the couple cannot get a quiet minute, and Quinn writes them with the specific affection of someone who has been in that kitchen. The scenes where three conversations happen at once and nobody finishes a sentence are the most authentic thing in the book, and the narration gives each of them enough voice that you can tell who is talking even with the chaos.

On the audio, the multi-narrator approach is the reason to pick this edition over the print one. Six voices in a book with this many group scenes means the chaos actually sounds like chaos, and the narrators keep the comic timing tight, which matters because the humour here is quick and mostly comes from interruption rather than from written jokes. Fourteen hours and fifteen minutes is a long time to spend in one Christmas, and the production keeps it buoyant.

What I cannot tell you is how it lands as a whole, because this is a release-day fiche and the book is out today, so there are no listener reviews to check my reading against. Nobody is telling me the ending falls apart and nobody is telling me it is the best of the three, and I would rather say that plainly than invent a complaint to fill the space. What I can say is that the pieces are the ones that worked in the first two, the premise is the funniest of the three, and the cast list is the best this series has had.

It reads as a standalone but it is the third of a set, so if you want to start properly, How My Neighbor Stole Christmas is the first trip to Kringletown, and Merry Christmas, You Filthy Animal is the one before this.