She started the blaze. The firefighter fanned the flame.

Abby Tyler welcomes you to the witty, well-meaning busybodies of Applebottom, Missouri, where the community takes its pies — and its matchmaking — very seriously.

Lorelei Spencer is over that loser who wasted the last few years of her life, and she’s going to prove it.

After she’s had enough mourning and midnight rage-crying, Lorelei dumps all the clothes, stuffed animals, notes, and mementos from the relationship on her front lawn. Then, she sets the pile ablaze.

It feels great.

Until it catches the grass on fire, too.

Volunteer firefighter Micah Livingston arrives on the scene and handily douses the blaze. But the fire he puts out sparks a new one in his heart when he realizes this feisty woman with a zeal for life might be exactly what he’s been looking for.

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

This was the sort of terrible, stupid thing that she’d been known for doing in high school. She would have thought that she’d have gained some common sense in the past six years. But no, when she got upset, it was as though all her brain cells flew out her ears.

“Gertrude here found out her blood pressure was a little high, and now she’s sure she’s going to have a stroke any minute.” “Don’t make fun of the dying,” Gertrude snapped.

Come on in out of the cold. And I don’t mean the weather. The frost coming off Gertrude could freeze a bull.

My Review:

Abby Tyler’s special brand of clever levity has provided another fun and entertaining read from the Applebottom series.   I don’t think I could ever tire of this uniquely peculiar community of meddlesome and feisty seniors who can throw shade like it’s an Olympic event. Having spent my formative years in a tiny inbred rural community, I know that it is vastly more enjoyable to read Abby Tyler’s highly amusing small-town tales, which she has expertly cast with variable tones of quirky and eccentric small-town characters, than it is to actually live among the close scrutiny of the crabby and petty old battle-axes who wag their tongues far more than their well-upholstered tails. I strongly suspect this only makes her humorous and sweetly written stories even more fun to indulge in.