Romance glows twice as bright when nights grow long. I ushered in winter’s first frost with Alix E. Harrow’s STARLING HOUSE (Tor, 320 pp., $28.99), which is perfect for when you want that Shirley Jackson creepy manor sauce drizzled over the small-town romance plot, in a way that’s probably not healthy but is absolutely delicious.

Some people say the bad luck in Eden, Ky., is just the usual accidents and environmental damage of mining coal. But others blame Starling House, built by the author of a children’s book featuring eerie beasts who are all mist and teeth.

Opal, an orphan, can’t care about the rumors: She’s too busy cobbling together a semblance of a life in a local motel, where she’s raising her younger brother, Jasper. She refuses to let this bright young man spend the rest of his life wheezing in a town that only worsens the asthma it gave him.

So when a series of ill-advised rebellions leads her to the doorstep of Starling House — Opal is furious and unscrupulous in a way that’s a joy to behold — she talks her way into a job as the housekeeper.

Arthur Starling, the house’s owner, is reticent with his words but overly, suspiciously generous with wages and gifts. It’s almost like he’s trying to repay a debt. Possibly it involves the many graves on the house’s grounds, or the sword he carries around at night, though Opal is supposed to leave the house before sunset. Opal’s never been good at following the rules, though — and the more Arthur tries to push her away, the closer she wants to get.

Harrow has shuffled the familiar Gothic motifs like an adroit Vegas dealer. Opal is the meddling, sullen housekeeper rather than the innocent new wife or governess; there is a catastrophic fire, but not where you’d expect; the house is threatening and powerful, but not half as sinister as the mining company’s representative. It’s a gorgeous, vicious howl of a story, and if I had a time machine I would have already given a copy to my younger self.

A gentler take on rebellion is at the heart of Andie Burke’s debut, FLY WITH ME (Griffin, 384 pp., paperback, $18). An anxious, grieving E.R. nurse, Olive Murphy, saves a passenger’s life on a flight, but the emergency diverts the plane and she has no way of getting to her destination on time. Luckily the extremely gorgeous pilot Stella Soriano volunteers to drive her there as a thank-you — oh, and incidentally, the video of Olive’s save went viral and could they possibly milk the publicity a little by pretending to date until Stella makes captain? The ensuing shenanigans are laid out in a frank voice, and the punchlines land just when you start to wonder if it’s too direct.

Nursing and piloting are both classic romance jobs: Those old Harlequins featured them by the bucketload. But this is not the sepia-toned, highly gendered variant: This is a modern, tongue-in-cheek view, more “Scrubs” than “A Farewell to Arms.” And like “Scrubs,” “Fly With Me” makes you laugh right before it makes you cry.

A loved one waking up from a coma, winning over your company’s sexist and homophobic C-suite — these are common if improbable plot points, but this is not a book to indulge in such pat resolutions. This is a book about facing truths even when they’re devastating, about how pizza parties are a poor substitute for a raise, about how people can be absolutely terrible but you don’t have to make the same miserable choices they insist you should.

Next up is my first Rachel Reid hockey romance. TIME TO SHINE (Carina Adores, 352 pp., paperback, $18.99) is a boisterous romp about big, dumb, muscular people with big, dumb, muscular hearts. Reading this was like rolling around on an autumn lawn with a pack of rambunctious puppies.

Landon Stackhouse is a junior league goalie who’s finally getting his shot in the N.H.L., thanks to another player’s injury. He’s not optimistic about his chances at staying in once the real goalie recovers, so rather than find an apartment of his own, he’s happy to take up a teammate’s offer of a spare bedroom. Casey Hicks is hockey royalty who chatters a mile a minute and seems to hook up with a different stranger every night. He couldn’t be more different than quiet, virginal, self-castigating Landon.

So why can’t they stay out of each other’s beds?

It starts as platonic comfort; a way for them to feel less alone in the dark of night before games. But things have a way of spiraling, and soon Landon and Casey are quiet little storms of longing and lust. Between career uncertainty, family tension and getting chirped by their teammates, our pair have to work for their togetherness. Happiness, Landon finds, is like a muscle: It gets easier to do it if you practice, build it up a little at a time.

In Courtney Milan’s excellent new historical novel, THE MARQUIS WHO MUSTN’T (Independently published, 370 pp., paperback, $15.99), happiness is a habit our hero Liu Ji Kai hasn’t yet cultivated. He prefers the habit of lying: He learned it from his father, a con man who, 20 years earlier, posed as the Marquis of Everlasting Beauty in Wedgeford, a largely Asian village in Kent. The elder Liu then absconded, briefly leaving his 6-year-old son behind to face an angry mob. Kai is determined to make up for his father’s sins, and has arrived in Wedgeford to commit one perfect fraud that will liberate him from guilt forever.

He’s surprised to be claimed as a fiancé by Miss Naomi Kwan as soon as he arrives. She just needs someone with male authority to persuade two gentlemen to let her take an ambulance class, and a pretend fiancé is perfect.

Kai, however, knows the engagement is real, that the two were betrothed as children. He worries that if he tells Naomi that one truth, he’ll spill all the others. It’s not safe for her to know all his secrets — but this book is all about the difference between what feels safe and what’s actually right.

Two books into this series, Wedgeford is as much a philosophical experiment as a piece of fiction. Utopian in the Thomas More sense, but thankfully much funnier, this fictional town is both a bubble that protects its characters within the historical setting and a lens through which romance forms acquire new shades of meaning.

For example, withheld secrets abound in the genre — just ask Edward Rochester — but in Wedgeford they become chances for characters to take a leap of faith, rather than to falter. Both this novel and the previous one, “The Duke Who Didn’t,” turn on moments where characters pass beyond suspicion and show deliberate, courageous trust at the precise moment any other romance would amplify doubt and self-interest. That moral optimism left me breathless, and filled me with light in this darkest time of year.