Great book and a quick read!

I stumbled on this book and was completely surprised by the story, because it sounds like it will be a story about girls bonding, but this is a story about high school sweethearts that are reunited while planning the ten year high school reunion for the small town high school.  The book is called Best Friends by Edna Curry.  While Cal stayed local after high school, Tami moved to the big city to pursue her career and forget about her high school life.  When she gets a letter in the mail to plan the reunion, she knows that she made an obligation to return to her hime town, but the one person that she hopes she doesn't see is the one person that can make her move back to her home town.
This is a good love story of a long ago love turning into a rekindled romance later in life.  I enjoyed it and love reading stories like these where two people find each other again and pick up right where they left off.  If you like stories of this type, I suggest this book.  It is a love story nonetheless, so it will hit the spot with people who like to read about the love between two people.

Suspense with Some Romance, Great With A Bowl Of Ice Cream!

Last week, I read a book called A Dangerous Harbor by RP Dalke.  This book is in the same series as Hurricane Hole by the same author that I read not too long ago.  This one I read over a few nights before bed last week.  When reading a suspenseful book, or something scary, I prefer to read these before bed opposed to after work.  If I cannot put the book down, I will not get my To Do list done, and that is a big no-no for me.  I love a good page turner, just not before 9pm, when I have everything else done.
This book was a great read and had just the right amount of romance mixed with suspense.  From the very beginning of the book, the story was intriguing, and it just kept going from there.  The setting is a Mexican boat marina, where a San Diego cop finds a dead body in the water and the investigation focuses on a number of people.  When Katy runs into Gabe, a long ago ex husband, and meets Raul, a new man in her life, things get competitive and steamy as she gets torn between the two before finally falling in love with Raul.  When the investigation points to a rich man that is docked at the marina that Katy has her boat in, people start turning up dead.

Secretly Smiiten by Colleen Coble, Kristin Billerbeck, Diann Hunt and Denise Hunter

Secretly Smitten is a collection of short stories that revolves around the Thomas family, a group of women who are all looking for love and they each find it in these stories, all set in the small town of Smitten.  The story begins when the girls find dog tags belonging to a man that is not their grandfather and they start unraveling the story behind the man that owns the dog tags, leading Tess to love.  She begins to get closer to David, a widower with a young daughter, in order to gain access to his attic where she can uncover some of the story for her grandmother.  Before she knows it, she has fallen in love with him.

Zoe is Tess’s sister and she wants to start a matchmaking service in Smitten to help people find love.  While she is busy getting her business off the ground, she meets the new city manager, William.  While he is a thorn in her side at first, doing everything he can to make sure she follows all of the city codes and keeps safety as her number one priority, even if it mean shutting down her first social event for her matchmaking service.  Once she starts to understand where he is coming from, they begin to see how compatible they are for each other.

Zoe and Tess’s mother, Anna, owns a knitting shop in Smitten and loves to socialize with all of the women that come to her store to shop and to knit.  She enjoys their company and even does not mind helping out the son of one of her customers, Michael, after he hurts his ankle and has trouble getting around.  As she checks in on him and runs errands for him, she becomes more and more fond of him.  Before she knows it, she is visiting him well after his ankle has healed and he even helps her with her new business venture, raising sheep in order to harvest the wool to spin yarn.  He even lets her use an empty barn that he owns to raise the sheep in, and helps her care for them as well.  As time goes on, they soon realize that they are in love.

Clare, Zoe and Tess’s sister, works at the local nursery and hopes to one day own her own nursery and do what she truly loves, landscaping and yard remodels.  When her boss goes out of town and she hires a drifter from out of town, she is not very optimistic that he will work out, let alone take over things when she faints at work and is forced to stay in bed until she gets better.  Not only does Ethan do a good job, but goes above and beyond when she gets sick and saves the day.  As they work closely together each day, she realizes that he is lonely and begins to invite him to dinner with her family, and eventually they fall in love.

When the story began, the dog tags were a mystery and the man that owned them was believed to be dead, until a secret is revealed that Aunt Violet had seen him and tried to confess her love for him, he was not dead after all, he just left town when his true love had married another man.  This is a heartwarming story and I recommend it to anyone who  likes a good love story.