Monthly Archives: March 2015

When I first started reading “In the Shadow of Winter”, I was struck by the beautiful descriptive prose of the story. It was almost as if I were reading poetry rather than a novel. Then the plot caught me in its grasp and I found that the book was as much as mystery as it was a romance.

The story is about Eleanor Phillips, a young woman who is struggling to keep her Cotswold family home after the deprivations of World War II. She has lost her mother long since and her father more recently. Her engagement to the man she loved was abruptly broken years before. She has picked up her broken pieces and is trying to make a home and living for herself and the young boy she has taken in during the war years.

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I just finished reading the third and what was the final book in the Bottom Dollar Series by Karen Gillespie. I am hopeful that Ms. Gillespie is planning on adding new books to her series based on some comments and a contest on her website.

“Dollar Daze” is a fun and funny book that deals primarily with romance in the older set. There are sweet parts, very sad, silly, and even laugh out loud parts. We get to see Mavis and Birdie vying for the same man, Mrs. Tobias being set up with someone oh, so different from her late husband, and finally we get to touch base with Elizabeth and Timothy now that their sweet bundle of joy is born and doing what most sweet bundles of joy do – deprive Mommy and Daddy of sleep and take over their lives.

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“The One That Got Away” is an excellent debut novel by Bethany Chase. I was extremely surprised to find that the author did not have an existing back list of books as the plot, characters, and the dialog of the book were so smooth and well polished that I expected it was from long experience. As that is not the case, I was blown away by the skills shown by this new author.

The book is set in Austin, TX and as someone who lived in Austin for many years, the story sucked me right in and put me in places that I knew very well. Another expectation? I felt sure that Ms. Chase was from Austin but apparently, she actually does excellent research and has a great hand at putting the right references in the right places to make the book feel like home to me.

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“Creature Comforts” is the first book I have read by Trisha Ashley. It was so enjoyable that it will certainly not be the last. I love to find new (to me) authors who have the ability to make a story come to life. That is how I felt about this book – as if I were glancing into a slice of life of a few good friends and their families who live in the small town of Halfhidden.

The book is a little bit romance, literary fiction, and mystery all rolled into one. Our main protagonist is Izzy – the rest of the story revolves around her. Izzy is back home to start a new clothing business that she has dreamed of and planned for years. She was also involved in a fatal car accident years before and, while she was held at fault, has no memory of what occurred. She is at a cross roads in her romantic life as she confronts whether or not she is still in love with the man she has been engaged to for years.

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