The Pumpkin Spice Café

The Pumpkin Spice Cafe is a 2023 small-town romance by Laurie Gilmore, published as a 360-page paperback by HarperCollins.

Jeanie inherits the cafe from her aunt and moves to Dream Harbor for a fresh start, which is the mechanism that puts an outsider into a community where everybody knows everybody. Logan is a farmer in the same town who has organised his life to avoid local gossip, and the novel sets his deliberate quiet against her open cheerfulness. He resists being drawn to her and fails. Logan has a farm to run and a reason for keeping to himself that the book takes its time explaining.

The book belongs to a group of autumn-themed small-town romances that found large audiences through social reading platforms in the early 2020s before being picked up by trade publishers. Its conflicts are community-sized, with a mystery attached to the cafe, and the guarantee of a happy ending is stated in advance. The cafe supplies the autumn fixtures the title promises, a town that turns out for its own traditions, and a small mystery attached to the aunt who handed the business on to her niece.