Quick & Dirty: Jamie runs from her life in New York City and ends up in Seaside Cove, North Carolina only to have her family arrive on her front doorstep. Still it was good enough that I'll read the next in the series. Obviously you need to dive into a characters mind every now and then but it was a little excessive in this book. It's a personal preference but if you get your characters to do something you know what they are thinking. Jacquie D'Alessandro also spent a lot of time describing what her characters were thinking. While I mostly enjoyed the book I think it's too wordy, the resolution could have been handled in a chapter but was spread it out over 4 or 5 chapters. As it turned out, Jamie's mother, niece, sister and her mother's younger boyfriend all show up and muddy the waters. This book could have been much better if it focused on the central characters. There she encounters her next door neighbor / landlord Nick and as you would expect the sparks fly. She heads to a small seaside town in North Carolina (I think it was North Carolina) where she finds herself living in a rundown beach house. I really like the premise for this book, Jamie runs away from her life in New York after her sister steals her boyfriend. I always enjoy it when characters behave like mature adults. Jamie doesn't let her feelings about Laurel, understandable as they are, influence Heather's relationship with her mom. Jamie also has a good relationship with Heather, but she doesn't lose sight of the fact she's the adult and Heather's a kid. It would have been easy to make Laurel a stereotypical neglectful mother/bitch sister, but D'Alessandro humanizes her. I did like how D'Alessandro handled the relationships between the heroine, Jamie, her niece, Heather, and Jamie's sister/Heather's mom, Laurel.

And One Last Thing by Molly Harper, in particular, springs to mind (incidentally, this was also a nominee for a contemporary RITA in 2011). The 'jilted woman runs away to a cottage/cabin by a body of water' plot has been done before. I thought it was okay, but nothing too earth-shattering. Summer at Seaside Cove was nominated for best contemporary. Owens, I've decided to spend June trying to mop up the RITA nominees. After spending April reading the bulk of Kristen Ashley's work and May re-reading Robin D.

At Last by Jacquie D'Alessandro