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About my cover … hmmm … no one who knows me would ever suggest that I have even a brushstroke of artistic talent or a lash of an artistic eye. This is why I’m grateful for cover designers. Nancy Fraser has designed many of mine, including the one for Patches of Red, and I never cease to be amazed that she knows what I want before I have it fully articulated. I’m convinced the necessary component of a cover is making the reader feel the story she’s about to read.
Harper
Loch, the setting for the Colors series, is a tiny country lake with a
population of less than a hundred. It’s a place where people go to start again,
to rest, to recover. It’s a place that feels like this cover looks.
Blurb~
He’s
handsome but can’t even remember her name. She’s pretty, but her finickiness
drives him crazy.
After
twenty years as a nurse practitioner in the same practice, Ellie Wentz gives
notice. When office politics interferes with her job, it’s time to get a new
one. When her son and daughter-in-law buy her house and she has sold and given
away everything else that’s not attached to her heartstrings, she packs up what
remains and goes to Harper Loch to spend time with her best friend. She’ll
decide what to do and where to go from there. No matter how much the handsome
friend of her friends annoys her.
Jesse
Grant comes to Harper Loch to help out his niece for a few weeks. He’s retired
from the navy, his boys are grown, and he’s at loose ends. But he really likes
the little lake community in Michigan—he thinks he might stay. Long widowed, he
has no interest in getting married again, and neither does the redhead he can’t
seem to avoid. And yet ...
To purchase PATCHES OF RED:
Amazon:
https://a.co/d/09fZR7nt
D2D: https://books2read.com/u/mZ98YJ
Excerpt~
His picture was on top. Not a baby picture or
anything like that, but one of a man in his thirties with chestnut hair not as
red as hers and chocolate brown eyes. She’d never seen him before. Or had she?
She had a slew of cousins on both her parents’ sides, but none of them were
this … this familiar.
The thought set off a sharpness inside. More
than an ache but less than a pain, it made her clench her fist at her side.
Once. Twice. She sipped at the wine, staring at the picture. He was a handsome
man, wearing shorts and a Northern Michigan University T-shirt. Judging by the
background, he was doing the annual walk across the Mackinac Bridge. The date
scribbled on the back was from three years earlier.
At that time, Dad would still have been …
mostly himself, for want of a better word. He made the walk across the bridge
most years, sometimes with Mom and sometimes alone or with friends. He’d never
asked Ellie to go, but the kids had gone at least once. Had it been with Dad or
with Gavin?
She didn’t remember.
Was the year of this picture when he’d
assembled the contents of the folder? Had he done it because even though he
knew he was going to die with secrets, he wanted her to know them? Somehow.
She set the picture aside. Carefully, as she
had her mother’s diaries, but apart from them. Whoever Declan McKissick was,
Ellie felt that threat even more now that she’d seen the picture.
The papers about him were all photocopies,
some of them not very good. His name was Declan Nelson McKissick. He was
thirty-six and had been born in Mackinac County to Barbara Ruth Gregson of St.
Ignace.
And Jason Nelson Murphy of Muskegon.
It took her breath away. Which it shouldn’t
have done, because her parents’ private lives had been just that—private. She’d
felt … oh, sort of righteous about it, as a matter of fact, that they’d all
been able to respect each other’s boundaries as well as they did. She’d learned
from that life value how to let her own children go. They even laughed together
about having secrets because Ma didn’t really want to know what they’d done
when they sneaked out after curfew.
Her parents’ trust in her decisions had been
absolute even when they didn’t like them, and she’d carried that on in her own
family.
But she’d never thought much about their
marriage—they were, after all, Mom and Dad. Just as she and Gavin were to their
kids. Only their kids called her “Ma,” much to her chagrin. That was what she
got for raising them on Little House on the Prairie reruns.
She was still sitting on the floor when Jess
arrived. He always knocked before coming in, so she had no doubt he did that
time, too, but she didn’t hear him. She didn’t know he was there until the door
closed behind him. When she looked up, he was standing with a pan in his hands,
a gaze of consternation aimed at her.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t hear you.”
“Are you okay?” He knelt, setting the soup pot
on the floor beside him, and reached for her hands. “What can I do?”
She didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t as if
she needed anyone to do anything at all. This wasn’t a crisis or
life-threatening or even life-changing.
Except that it was.
She withdrew one of her hands from his and
reached for the picture taken on the Mackinac Bridge. “This is Declan
McKissick,” she said, “my brother.”
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Bio~
Retired
from the post office, Liz Flaherty spends non-writing time sewing, quilting,
and doing whatever else she wants to. She and Duane live in the old farmhouse
in North Central Indiana they moved to in 1977. They’ve talked about moving,
but really…40-some years’ worth of stuff? It’s not happening!
She’d
love to hear from you at lizkflaherty@gmail.com
or please come and see her at:
Website: http://lizflaherty.net
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/lizkflaherty
Twitter: https://twitter.com/LizFlaherty1
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lizkflaherty/
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/47998031-the-healing-summer
Thanks for joining us and sharing your cover with us, Liz!
