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Andrea Noble is coming home. An
intelligent, beautiful and caring lady who's
been through a bad marriage and divorce, she wants nothing to do with men,
particularly those smooth-talking, charming player types. Her sole focus
is
on whipping the Bayou Blue Clinic into shape as its new director, and that's
no small feat for a clinic that'ss been badly mismanaged and is on the verge
of
disaster.
Lee Matthews, aka Jamal Turner, is devastatingly handsome and charming and has serial-lover written all over him. Hired to investigate the
goings-on
at the clinic, he finds himself torn between his professional instincts and
his personal attraction to the new director. Before long, he finds that
his
priorities have changed. No longer is he focused on solving the mystery,
turning the matter over to the police and moving on. He's now
involved. He
needs to resolve the issues himself. Because he cares. He cares,
more than
he's willing to admit for the clinic and for Andrea.
Andrea's matchmaking grandmother, deciding that her granddaughter is in dire
need of some good male companionship and having selected Jamal for the job,
constantly engineers to have them thrown together. Andrea's
grandmother is an
absolutely delightful secondary character, along with the colorful and
flamboyant mother, Charlene.
Ms. Emery very skilfully develops the main characters, Andrea and Jamal.
The
unfolding of their tenuous relationship was well executed. And the
description of the Louisiana bayou, the life, the language and the settings,
shone through clearly. You heard the music, tasted the food, felt the
atmosphere.
My only difficulty with this story was that towards the end of the novel,
where there was more focus on the mystery while trying to maintain interest in
the relationship, the development of both (i.e. the mystery and the
relationship) suffered somewhat, and did not progress as smoothly as at the
start.
Lynn Emery continues her trend of writing beautiful love stories with real,
colorful and lively characters. This is Ms. Emery's first book for
the
Harper Torch line, and as the second romance in that line, GOTTA GET NEXT TO
YOU is a well-recommended read. |
