Jo-Ann Mapson - Böcker

Hank and Chloe are as star-crossed as Romeo and Juliet - but sexier and a lot more fun. This is a love story with a salsa bite and a winning heart. Chloe Morgan is a thirty-three-year-old part-time waitress, small-time horse trainer, and full-time thoroughly toughened western woman living in a corner of the dwindling canyonlands of Southern California. Calloused and wary, Chloe allows herself to love with total abandon and has complete faith in only her horse and her dog. That is, until a quirk in the weather and a sunrise funeral service cause her to cross the path of Henry Oliver, a sedate professor of folklore at the local college who, like Chloe, has his reasons for holding back. But once Hank steps inside Chloe's makeshift cabin in the hills, Chloe realises she must come to terms with her losses and decide between the life of solitude she had always thought was her fate and the love of a man who seems all wrong.

Phoebe DeThomas, thirty-eight and confined to a wheelchair, has always led life as a spectator, in awe of her beloved Aunt Sadie and overshadowed by her brother James, a financial wizard. But when Sadie dies and leaves Phoebe a flower farm, Phoebe's world begins to blossom for the first time. She takes in three women who have suffered losses of their own, a romantic break-up, a lost job, an eviction - and together they get the farm up and running. The bonds they form as they nurture the land gradually heal their hearts and help them make life-changing decisions. BAD GIRL CREEK is the tender, deeply moving story of their brief idyll. By exploring the women's strengths and needs and the complexities of families and friendships, Jo-Ann Mapson takes familiar themes and treats them with humour and sensitivity.

USA Today called Jo-Ann Mapson's national bestseller Bad Girl Creek "a valentine to oceans of good women who survive bad beginnings and worse men." Now the author, hailed as "one of the most gifted writers of the contemporary urban West" (Los Angeles Times), brings back the hard-luck women of her acclaimed previous novel -- and introduces another indelible character into their midst. After finally wising up to her drunken rodeo crooner lover, Mary Madigan saddles up her twin border collies and takes her act on the road, leaving miles of heartache and highway behind. When she meets Rick, a charming and persistent journalist haunted by his own ghosts, she suddenly has a travel companion and a new lover (with an all-too-familiar set of tricks). Their travels ultimately bring them to Bad Girl Creek, where the waters have already been troubled. Phoebe's pregnancy is life-threatening, Nance's break-up diet has turned dangerously successful, Beryl is still struggling to adjust to life after prison, and HIV-positive Ness is distancing herself from the "healthy" world -- if you can call it that. But these are the Bad Girl Creek ladies: they are resilient. The ways they pull together, cheer each other on through good times and bad, and cope with every curve life throws at them make up the heart and soul of this powerful and big-hearted novel.

Five challenging years have passed in the lives of the ladies of Bad Girl Creek. Beryl, Nance, Ness, and Phoebe have experienced their share of hardship and heartache but also much love and happiness. Beryl now lives with Earl in Alaska, where the fissures in their relationship have started to spread. But then Earl disappears one wintry night. Nance, on the heels of a string of devastating miscarriages, has been advised to stop trying for a baby. Phoebe finds herself overwhelmed by her five-year-old daughter, Sally, and an enigmatic Southern charmer named Andrew. And Ness tenderly nurses David Snow as he gradually succumbs to AIDS. The farm's successes have brought profits, but when a nursery opens across the road, the bar is set higher yet again. Life rolls on, though, and in the midst of myriad misfortunes come explosive surprises. The old friends are challenged to reunite once again, to rediscover with fresh eyes the powerful words in Aunt Sadie's journal: Live life to the fullest. Love as often as you can. Regret nothing. Eat hearty. Laugh often. Plant flowers. And don't forget to dance.

After losing her teaching position at the local university, Mariah Moon will do anything to keep her gifted twelve-year-old daughter, Lindsay, in a prestigious private school -- which means moving in with her mother and grandmother in an apartment above The Owl & Moon Café. When her mother, Allegra, is diagnosed with leukemia, Mariah rises to the challenge of running the café: mastering her mother's famous fudge and chatting up customers -- including a man who might just reawaken her heart. Meanwhile, Lindsay's controversial entry in a major national science contest creates a minor maelstrom in the cosseted Monterey Bay community. And Allegra, with one last great love affair in her, will revisit a man she loved so many years ago, and disclose the biggest secret of the Moon family: the identity of Mariah's father. Will the Moon women recognize this as the moment to do away with their family history of dubiously fathered children, and learn to forgive others and themselves in order to move forward? In her poignant new novel, bestselling author Jo-Ann Mapson explores the complexities of love and family with the keen eye and stylistic grace that have made her books perennial favorites.

Glory Vigil, newly married, unexpectedly pregnant at 41, is nesting in the home she and her husband Joseph have just moved to in Santa Fe, a house that unknown to them is rumored to have a resident ghost. Their adopted daughter Juniper is home from college for Thanksgiving and in love for the very first time, quickly learning how a relationship changes everything. But Juniper has a tiny arrow lodged in her heart, a leftover shard from the day eight years earlier when her sister Casey disappeared-in a time before she'd ever met Glory and Joseph. When a fieldwork course takes Juniper to a pueblo only a few hours away, she finds herself right back in the past she thought she'd finally buried.A love story, a family story, a story of searching and the bond between sisters, Finding Casey is a testament to human resilience.