Jane Linfoot is a best selling author, who lives in a muddy cottage, up a steep hill in Derbyshire, with her family, their pets, and an astonishing number of spiders. Although she loves seeing cow noses over the garden wall, she’s happy she can walk to a supermarket.

Jane grew up in North Yorkshire where she spent a lot of her childhood avoiding horizontal gales blowing off the sea, and wrote her first book by accident while working as an architect, and renovating country houses. While she loves to write feelgood books that let readers escape, she’s always surprised to hear her stories make people laugh, admits to (occasionally) crying as she writes, and credits her characters for creating their own storylines.

Jane’s garden would be less brambly if she wasn’t on Facebook and Twitter so often. On days when she wants to be really scared, she rides a tandem.

Her latest books include a series of stand-alone novels, based around a seaside wedding shop in Cornwall. Cupcakes and Confetti – The Little Wedding Shop by the Sea, Sequins and Snowflakes – Christmas at the Little Wedding Shop, and Bunting and Bouquets – Summer at the Little Wedding Shop, and most recently, The Little Cornish Kitchen. These are all published by Harper Impulse, an imprint of Harper Collins.

Follow Jane on Twitter @janelinfoot, or find her on her Author Page Facebook or her Personal Page Facebook. She’s also on Instagram, and has lots of Pinterest boards relating to her novels.

Welcome back to Aspen Cove, the town where a stranger is simply a friend you haven’t met…

Eden Webster has always been generous to a fault. The word no isn’t in her vocabulary. That’s how at twenty-eight she finds herself homeless, alone, and pregnant in Aspen Cove. Abandoned by the one person she should have been able to count on, her sister Suzanne, she’s forced to accept the generosity of strangers. The last thing she expects is to meet Mr. Right at exactly the wrong time.

Handsome firefighter Thomas Cross lives by one rule—never trust a woman with your heart. After months of waiting for his baby to be born, he’s delivered the truth of his girlfriend’s betrayal. When Doc Parker asks him to put Eden up for a few months until her baby is born, he’s certain he’ll be able to keep his distance. But the more time they spend together, the more he realizes love is not something that can be overruled by logic.

Will Thomas allow room in his heart for Eden and her baby, or will he go back to being the man who cannot trust? Find out in One Hundred Goodbyes…

Cindi Madsen is a USA Today bestselling author of contemporary romance and young adult novels. She sits at her computer every chance she gets, plotting, revising, and falling in love with her characters. Sometimes it makes her a crazy person. Without it, she’d be even crazier. She has way too many shoes, but can always find a reason to buy a pretty new pair.

Favorite Quotes:

She leaned toward Liddie. She smelled like her father used to, a mix of coffee and marijuana. “Waking and baking these days?”

“Have you ever thought about what they must’ve been like before all of us? … I think about it. They met. They fell in love. They were regular people once.” “And what? We made them into irregular people?”

They always got the leftovers. The things left in the lost and found. If Liddie wrote a biography of her childhood, it would be called Nothing Was Ever Mine.

That was the bargain of being a twin. You didn’t need to talk about it; you simply knew that sometime in the not too distant future, you’d be living together in some old-age home, dressed alike the way you’d been as children.

He always smelled the same— slightly refrigerated. It was a smell Mary liked because it meant coolness to her. Not in a fashion sense but in the temperature way. He was calm, steady.

Of everyone in their family, the person she’d understood the least had been her mother. When Kate thought of her, she always seemed diaphanous. Like one of those Instagram filters had been applied to her, washing her out, smoothing away the lines. Nothing ever seemed to stick to her, not criticism or her children, not even her husband. She simply floated around, photographing it all, removed.

My Review:

Quite a clever gal, that Catherine McKenzie! This well-crafted mystery was full of simply explained yet brilliantly placed twists and turns that kept me on edge and off-center.   The storylines were highly eventful and ingeniously paced with tension and intrigue steadily ratcheting up the scale, and I was sucking it all in like the latest and greatest vacuum on the market.   I enjoyed the shrewdly discerning tale as much as the skill and cunning in the telling of it.

This family was well beyond quirky, they were each oddly peculiar and self-absorbed. I didn’t care for any of them by the time I finished the book, yet I was driven to know all about them. I had great empathy for the stalwart employee and held my breath for him and cringed each time evidence pointed his direction. Each character was fascinatingly flawed and I enjoyed unearthing their many secrets. This was only my second time reading her work but I am eager to see what Ms. McKenzie comes up with next, she now has a rather rabid fangirl on her hands.

Waisted

by Randy Susan Meyers

Randy Susan Meyers is the bestselling author of Waisted, Accidents of Marriage, The Comfort of Lies, The Murderer’s Daughters, and The Widow of Wall Street. Her books have twice been finalists for the Mass Book Award and named “Must Read Books” by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. She lives with her husband in Boston, where she teaches writing at the Grub Street Writers’ Center.

Find out more about Randy at her website, and connect with her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

Louise is one of the richest women in town but not one of the smartest. She was once quite the beauty, but that ship has sailed. She spends most of her time standing on the dock waving a hanky, begging it to come back to her. Which means she spends a lot of time in Faye’s salon.

She has always respected and feared lawyers, as if they possess something she never could, some special insight into truth and justice, a gift bestowed on them at birth, like a pitching arm or a brilliant mind.

She is standing by Faye’s elbow, annoyingly close. Faye can smell the determination on her like alcohol on a barfly.

Faye has already grown to hate that word, missing, the snakelike quality of it, the way people’s tongues get stuck on the S’s. It makes her unfairly angry at Millicent for saying it just like that, a hiss instead of a word… She is already anticipating tragedy, tasting it on her tongue like the ham that comes with funerals.

He’s heard you don’t have to let cops in unless they have a warrant, so he has no intention of throwing open his door, of saying, Come on in, fellas. Cops are like vampires; they have to be invited in, but once you invite them in, they have the power.

 My Review:

I waffled a bit in how to rate this tautly written, absorbing, and well-crafted book. Yet when looking at my marked quotes, my indecision promptly evaporated as the sublime quality of Ms. Whalen’s writing removed all doubt. The evolution of the story was incrementally slow and told with a multiple POV, yet all the pieces proved to be necessary and an increasing level of tension and additional layers of intrigue steadily inched forward with each compelling chapter. I feared many loose ends – silly me! This cunning and cleverly perceptive wordsmith wrapped them all up rather neatly, and for the most part, unexpectedly. Lesson learned, I unswervingly pledge I will never second-guess her extraordinarily nimble skill for subterfuge again.

Marybeth Mayhew Whalen is the author of When We Were Worthy, The Things We Wish Were True, and five previous novels. She speaks to women’s groups around the United States and is the co-founder of the popular women’s fiction site She Reads (www.shereads.org). Marybeth and her husband, Curt, have been married for twenty-seven years and are the parents of six children. Marybeth divides her time between the suburbs of Charlotte, North Carolina, and the coastline of Sunset Beach, North Carolina. You can find her at www.marybethwhalen.com.

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