This week's CFBA tour highlights Susan May Warren's book Reclaiming Nick. I have learned a lot about writing from Susie by attending her workshops at the ACFW National Conference and thoroughly enjoyed this book.
Award winning author SUSAN MAY WARREN recently returned home to her native Minnesota after serving for eight years with her husband and four children as missionaries with SEND International in Far East Russia. She now writes full time from Minnesota's north woods.
The story focuses on a host of broken and hurting characters who have to work together to save a ranch in Montana. Nick Noble left the ranch ten years earlier after an explosion with his family. He's coming home now to prevent his former best friend from inheriting half the ranch under Nick's father's will.
Piper Sullivan, an investigative reporter, is chasing Nick to prove that he murdered a woman instead of her brother who was sent to jail for that murder. She's signed on as the cook for the summer...only problem is she's a vegetarian on a cattle ranch who can't cook biscuits let alone Rocky Mountain Oysters.
Throw in Nick's high school love Maggy who is now married to his former best friend Cole, a dozen misunderstandings, lies and misunderstandings, and you have a family in need of healing.
I don't usually read straight romance. I find them too predictable and routine. I read to escape and learn something, and I think that's why I like historical fiction and suspense. Here Susan crafted a book filled with characters that I cared about. They were three-dimensional with the kind of struggles that kept me thinking about the book when I wasn't reading.
The setting was also interesting and though there was a legal subplot, Susan did enough research to get it right. In the end Nick and Piper discover that a prodigal can come home, but the journey to that point is filled with twists and turns that I sometimes thought they wouldn't navigate -- but it's a romance, so there is a happily ever after. At least until the sequel comes out.
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