Let me engineer a made-up query that has an element I saw in several entries.

Emily was worried. She knew that meeting Nick’s parents would be a minefield. She couldn’t ski, she couldn’t ice skate. She was going to be completely out of place– from the sounds of it, Christmas with the Millers was nothing but a sequence of winter sports. But she really started to lose it when she discovered that Nick’s mom was in the Daughters of the Confederacy.

I ran into a query like this (that was actually probably more subtle) and I read it three times before I got the subtext. Which is here is: Nick is white, Emily is black. The book is an interracial romance.

The author doesn’t state that, though. They imply it. They artfully suggest it. But they don’t state it out right.  Instead, it’s hinted at it in a single, important…