Double feature: Delinsky and Brown

Book group therapy

Sandy Huseby: In Coast Road, Rachel finds friends in a book group, and you mention in the acknowledgments your own book group. What do they contribute to you as a person, as a writer?
Barbara Delinsky: I've been in a book group for nearly ten years, and it's much like Rachel's. What do I get out of it? As a writer, very little of a direct nature. I'm the only writer in the group, which makes it more interesting and, frankly, refreshing for me as a person -- and as a person . . . ahhhh . . . that's where I reap HUGE rewards. There's the discipline of reading a book that I might not otherwise read and the intellectual stimulation of hearing others' insights. Mostly, as with Rachel's book group, there's the bonding. I rarely see these women from meeting to meeting, and because of that, there's a kind of immunity that allows for intimate discussion. We blurt out things we might not say to co-workers, neighbors, or even longtime friends. What can I say? Book group is therapy.

SH: Several of your novels are due for filming. What new challenges have you set for yourself?
BD: As amazing as film sales are (there have been four major ones in the last few months), they have little impact on my life. I am not even sure I would be able to watch a movie made from one of my books. Rather, my new challenges deal solely with my books. I have spent the entirety of my career trying to improve with better plotting, fresher wording, greater emotional thrust. I'm always looking for new ways of approaching my subjects. What's coming next is a group of books set in the same small (fictitious) New England town. Each will have different lead characters and an issue with which we can all identify, but which will be easier to isolate and understand in the microcosm of small-town life.

REVIEWS BY SANDY HUSEBY

Since her earliest writing in series romance, Barbara Delinsky has displayed a talent for creating well-crafted, multi-faceted characters. Now a best-selling author, that gift continues to burnish her writing like gold.

Delinsky delves deeper into the human heart and spirit with each new novel. In Coast Road, a chilling auto accident brings Jack McGill face to face with the unfinished business of his former marriage.

Rachel Keats, his ex-wife, lies comatose in a Monterey, California, hospital, as Jack picks up the threads of their shared past and cares for their two daughters, Samantha and Hope. While he is home, he confronts their breakup from a new perspective. Because creating a successful, world renowned architectural firm had been so all-consuming, Jack ignored the fact that the life he was building was strangling Rachel's spirit. Her appeal that they make a fresh start in Big Sur, and her subsequent departure without him, made barely a ripple in his drive for greater professional achievements.

As he sits at her hospital bedside and copes with rebuilding his relationship with his daughters, Jack rediscovers the first Rachel he loved through examining her artistic gifts and the bonds of friendship she's built in Big Sur. Now, Jack must decide whether he wants to be part of her new world--whether he's willing, this time, to fight for their lives together.

Coast Road is a remarkable journey and affirmation that the bond between the right man and woman can be tested, stretched to seemingly irretrievable lengths, and hold.


Love on the moors

Irish storyteller JoAnn Ross offers A Woman's Heart, an enrapturing tale of love wide enough to encompass family, community, and homeland--and one vagabond horror novelist.

Nora Fitzpatrick sacrificed her own plans to care for her da and siblings after her mother died in childbirth. Quinn Gallagher has never believed in family, his own experience embittered by the brutality he witnessed as a child in a series of foster homes. But there's magic in the lush air of west Ireland, and in this, Ross weaves a tale of love offered unfettered that will find a lasting place in readers' hearts.


Stormy weather

A 20-year-old murder leads Jack Sawyer into Anna Corbett's life in Unspeakable by Sandra Brown. Brown excels here as she meets the daunting challenge of portraying the voice of a woman who does not speak.

When convicted killer Carl Herbold escapes from prison, he unleashes a fury of old scandal and questions unanswered. Brown's vivid, often poignant, nerve-tingling story whirls through the lives of Blewer County, East Texas, like the twister that threatens to rip the community apart.

At the eye of the storm are Anna and Jack, doomed to confront Herbold and their own inner demons. Emotionally wrenching and captivating, Unspeakable delivers earthy, evocative suspense as only Sandra Brown can.


Fit to be tied

When a cowboy realizes the error of his ways, his awakening is the fun for the reader in The Cowboy Crashes a Wedding by Anne McAllister.

Cash Callahan figures Milly Malone will bide her time waiting for him while he wanders the countryside hooking up with one rodeo or another. But Milly has other ideas, and Cash returns just in time to learn she's marrying someone else. Oh, Cash fights it, like a dogie resisting the lariat, but the memories of how much they've shared over the years pull on his heartstrings like a champion's rope.


Duke university

Training a lowly teacher to be a proper English Duke is more than Lady Rosemary Devering bargains for in The Temporary Duke by Melinda McRae--especially when Adrian Stamford proves to be a frisky student, given to pranks and teasing. But no shallow student is Stamford, whose commanding presence in emergency proves him more than worthy to fill in for the Duke.

Duty and love clash in this sparkling story of class and propriety at odds.


Sandy Huseby writes and reviews from her homes in Fargo, ND, and Nevis, MN. She is online at SHuseby@aol.com.

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