HOME AGAIN
THE CHESAPEAKE DIARIES — BOOK TWO
ON SALE JULY 27!

Dear Readers ~

Summer time, and the living is...well, beastly hot all up and down the East Coast! We’ve had record setting heat here in Southeastern Pennsylvania for the past I forget how long because my brain has been fried to a crisp. Even the dogs want to stay in — except for our daughter’s Jack Russell who likes to play with the hose, which she has figured out how to turn on. This dog is hilariously funny — she even squirted one of the other dogs in the face yesterday, clever little minx that she is! If I can remember to charge the battery on the video camera, we’ll take some footage of Carson playing water warden and share them somewhere — assuming, of course, that we can figure out how to upload the video, once we’ve figured out how to take it!

I do want to thank all of you who bought COMING HOME when it was released at the end of March. Thanks to you, in its first week of sales, COMING HOME was:

#1 bestselling romance in Borders (#3 bestselling mass market overall);
#11 bestselling mass market at Barnes & Noble;
#11 on Publisher’s Weekly bestselling mass market list;
#12 On the New York Times bestselling mass market list ~
AND spent 5 weeks on USAToday and 9 weeks on Bookscan's Romance list!

Bless you all for giving this new venture of mine a chance!

Which brings me to HOME AGAIN — Book 2 in the Chesapeake Diaries — which goes on sale on July 27. This is a book I’ve waited sixteen years to write. Well, no, it didn’t take me that long, but Dallas MacGregor, a very minor, off-the-page character, has been lurking around in the back of my mind all that time. When Dallas’s life falls apart — thanks to her philandering husband — there’s only one place for her to retreat with her young son, Cody: her great-aunt’s home in St. Dennis, where she spent all her childhood summers. It’s been twenty years since she last spent any real time there, so she’s pleasantly surprised by the welcome she and Cody receive. One thing that doesn’t surprise her is finding that Grant Wyler, her first real love, still attracts her, still makes her laugh, still turns her inside out.

Grant’s been back in St. Dennis for a year, long enough to establish his veterinary practice and open a rescue shelter at his clinic. He’s still licking his wounds after a divorce that left him with little more than a daughter, Paige, who is almost a teenager. Though Grant knows that Dallas will be leaving at the end of the summer, he’s not afraid to put his heart on the line — again — for the woman he’s never stopped thinking about. At its heart, HOME AGAIN is a story about family and relationships, love lost and found, taking risks, and second chances — at any age.

I should add that Dallas’s husband, Emilio, was not based on any real person. I’d written his character well before certain celebrity types made the news with their bad behavior!

This is one of my all time favorite books of the twenty-eight I’ve written — I hope you love the characters and the story as much as I do. For the next few weeks, I’ll be posting excerpts on Mondays up until the date the book goes on sale on July 27, so check back on Monday, July 19, and Monday, July 26.

Click here to read Excerpt #1 from HOME AGAIN.

Click here to read Excerpt #2.

Click here to read Excerpt #3.

To celebrate the release of HOME AGAIN (and the fact that it’s being published almost on my birthday!), I’m going to give away a BLOOMSBURY BOOKBAG stocked with reading goodies (from Levengers). To enter, send an email through this website between July 27 and August 13. I’ll draw a winner at random on August 14, so be sure to include your postal address in your email. Sorry — USA residents only, please.

So it’s back to work for me on ALMOST HOME, the third Chesapeake Diaries book, which will be released on March 22, 2011. This is Steffie Wyler’s book. When her long-time crush, Wade MacGregor, comes back to St. Dennis, the fur is flying. Because Wade didn’t come back alone, and Steffie...well, suffice it to say that Wade has some ‘splainin’ to do!

Happy summer! Stay cool!

xxox



PS: So many of you have written and asked me to post the recipe for coconut cake from DEVLIN’S LIGHT — so here it is: Great-Aunt Nola’s Award-winning Coconut Cake

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