Love in all the wrong places – Caro Robertson was a professional researcher, employee and occasional on-air reporter for a national public radio outlet; the perfect job, the perfect condo, the perfect fiancée. She had the college education, the job, the social position, the perfect life … and then in one fell swoop, everything went sour. Wrong. Disastrously wrong. In the space of a single week, she lost her beloved pet, the perfect fiancée and then her job. What was left for her, but to return to Alder Grove, the little town in Texas where she lived as a child and try to rebuild that life and a new career?

Mark Bascomb – owner of a small fabrication business, small-town handyman, veteran and high-school drop-out; everything in life that Caro Robertson wasn’t. Could they find common ground with each other, a common interest, even love, when they are so different?

Find out when the sparks fly in Alder Grove, in this short romance novel by the author of the Chronicles of Luna City, and the Adelsverein Trilogy.

Unlike one of my other novels – My Dear Cousin – the concept and characters for this one did not appear in a dream. It is the result of a dare and a challenge during a Zoom get-together with the other contributors to a tech and history blog that I regularly contribute to. The various writers to that blog are widely scattered and we meet regularly via Zoom to discuss matters of interest to us all. Such sessions are often wide-ranging. Late in the fall of 2025 the conversation wandered onto the dire economic impact of student college loans and how that impacted romance and marriage; how people who had blindly assumed such loans in the expectation of earning a comfortable living with their degree (many of them female) were stuck working in low-paying jobs after graduation and thus had limited prospects for marriage. Whereas young men who had instead opted for a blue-collar, working-class profession which gave them autonomy and a comfortable income … but such young men just weren’t attractive prospects for young college graduate women. The trend in pop culture seemed to hold that college-graduated women would be marrying down in marrying a plumber, HVAC or skilled trades man – even if that man was economically doing ever so much better. So, it was suggested that perhaps some kind of media trend in entertainment might joggle the culture … to make it attractive or even trendy for a college-graduate woman to marry a skilled-trades high-school-maybe guy … a Hallmark movie romance, or a novel … and at that juncture all the guys in the call looked at me, as the novel writer among them, chanting “Do it! Do it!”

So I did – it sounded like a fun and interesting challenge, writing in a genre that I hadn’t worked in, on a tight deadline, and with the essential plot already mapped out for me: just the characters, conversation, descriptions and specific incidents to be created: easy-peasy. So here it is – a Christmas present for you all. The eBook will be available on Christmas Eve, and a print version shortly thereafter.