TWT: OF A PALM BEACH PERSUASION Adult Women's Fiction

Query:

When the bubble pops on the real estate market, The Ellis family, although Palm Beach royalty, find themselves upside down on multiple properties and in serious need of liquid assets. Maggie Ellis is most amused when her father decides to rent their Palm Beach mansion to an L.A. band hunkering down to write their next album. Amused that is, until the musicians staying in her father’s home reconnect Maggie to her only love, her high school boyfriend, who’s proposal she once fled.

Literally.

And yes, more than ten years later, she’s still embarrassed about that.

Between closing on her own first home, keeping up with the projects she’s planned for it, and managing her career as a food photographer and the food blogger behind, “Picture Perfect Recipes,” Maggie knows it’s best to stay clear of the inevitable love tangles quickly knotting between her extended family and the men staying in her childhood home. But mostly, she wants to avoid Gavin, whose part in those entanglements tear at the heart she now realizes never healed.

It’s Persuasion under the glare of the baking south Florida sun with jet ski accidents instead of sea wall tumbles, and a modern heroine who is not lifted in and out of carriages because she drives her own Mercedes.

250: (The book begins with a blog post.)

February 15, 2007
Almond Granola Bark, a.k.a. Road Trip Fuel
Recipe Box File Under: snacks, other

What do you like to eat on road trips? What if the trip begins on snowy roads and ends in 85 degree heat? What if it’s a moving road trip? A you-lived-somewhere-eleven-years but... it’s time. Chapter closed. On the road.

Is there a food for that?

When this publishes I will be winding around DC’s Dupont Circle, my townhouse of the past six years disappearing in the back window. I will weave and turn until I find myself on 395 soon to be spit out on 95, the highway that takes me to my hometown home. I’m moving back.

The Florida girl is still in me. I love the sun and the heat and the mangoes. The thick salty air. Driving past Sandhill Cranes by the dozen pecking through an empty lot or coming home to a smaller family group of the birds honking a parade down my driveway. (Yes, this has happened.) I don’t even mind braking for alligators (also true), though I’m not crazy about the giant lizards (tiny dinosaurs). We’ll blame them for my 11-year hiatus.

But you know how I am. Of course I’ve got to tie up the loose ends for work and organize the packing, but I’ve also got to plan the travel menu. No surprise - my kitchen was the final room to be dwindled down into boxes.