February 15, 2006

Books of the Week: Books with outstanding love affairs

Since yesterday was Valentine’s Day, this might be a good time to mention a few books I’ve enjoyed that contain outstanding love affairs. I have to say, Linda Howard does a great job of depicting people who can fall in love under the strangest circumstances. She makes it believable and workable. These characters not only fall in love, you can tell they’ll stay in love. Two of her books, among the many she’s written, are especially wonderful in this respect: Hearts of Fire and Open Season. You can easily find these in paperback if you’ve missed them until now. You won’t be disappointed.

Coming from a completely different direction, I can’t pass up the opportunity to mention the relationship between Angela Gennaro and Patrick Kenzie that forms the basic groundwork for Dennis Lehane’s series of novels beginning with A Drink Before the War. Their love affair is heartbreaking, poignant, and profoundly moving. Sacred may be the best of Lehane’s detective novels about the two, but all of his books are worth reading. These are modern American classics.

Eve Dallas and Roarke of J.D. Robb’s futuristic detective series also have a great relationship, which has certainly hit plenty of bumps in the road to happiness.

I think what makes these “written” couples especially intriguing is the process of overcoming their differences with mutual respect and admiration to arrive at a great bond. Only a truly talented writer can capture your imagination like that.

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I finally finished GRAVE SURPRISE, the second Harper Connelly, and sent it off to my agent and to my editor. Of course, finishing a book doesn’t really mean it’s finished. I’ll get back the edited version, then the copy-edited version, then the galleys, then the ARCs. By then, like most writers, I’m convinced that the book is no good whatsoever, and that no sane person would plunk down money for anything I write. But for a few days after I send it away, the euphoria is amazing.

Next, I need to write a short story for an anthology my friend Toni Kelner and I are putting together. I have been changing my mind daily on what to submit for my own anthology. The book’s going to be called MANY BLOODY RETURNS, and the theme is vampires and birthdays. Some of the stories will be serious, some of them will be comic, and we hope all of them will be entertaining. We certainly have a great lineup of writers who’ve agreed to submit stories, and the first one’s already in our hot little grasp. I’ll let you know how this new project progresses. I’ve never edited an anthology, and I hope Toni and I are still friends when the whole thing is put together!

After I’ve done my short story, it’s on to the next Sookie. I’m putting in serious thinking time about this book already, since it’s going to be a complicated one.

I’ll have to grab a little time here and there next week, since my husband is having minor surgery and I have to be on hand, of course. Also, my daughter’s softball season starts. This is a very big event in our year, both socially and athletically. When our two older boys were small, we never got to see anyone unless it was at the Boys and Girls Club ballpark; I remember taking Julia to Patrick’s games when she was two months old. Baseball for both the boys was a chance for us to take a break from routine, visit with friends who had children the same age, and just sit and enjoy watching our children do something they enjoyed. It only grew stressful when the boys were playing on different fields, and we had to split up to see as much as we could see. Now we only have Julia playing, and she is very serious about sports, especially softball. She’s played on a traveling team for several years, but this year, since she’d finally old enough, she’ll be playing for the school. So as my husband recuperates, wish us luck during the season of lawn chairs, ice chests, and mosquito repellant.