Lady of the Night

ISBN13: 978-0-9896574-7-1
Buy the Book: AmazonBarnes & NobleApple BooksKobo

 
Excerpt: View/Download

OVERVIEW

New Orleans nights are as intriguing as the lives of three friends raised together on the city's streets. Lifelong solidarity has seen each man through difficult times, but challenges still lurk in the Big Easy, where love is always complicated–but worth any struggle.

Joshua Martane Should Know Better

The fragile young woman lying comatose in the ward of City Hospital in New Orleans has no name. When she finally awakens, the only thing she can remember is a man's voice calling her back from the darkness.

In all his years of training, no one has touched psychologist Joshua Martane in the same way, and he has spent long hours by the woman's bedside trying to bring her back to awareness. Now that he has, he realizes he's put his career and his heart in danger. Who exactly is the woman he names Maggie? A former prostitute? The near victim of a serial killer? A woman lying about a past she claims not to remember? Mystery surrounds who she is–and who she isn't, but Joshua's own feelings are clear.  Maggie has quickly becomes more to him than a patient.

As Maggie recovers she resolves to find her way in a world and a city that are completely unfamiliar to her. At first she leans on Joshua, but soon she realizes how dangerous that is. Someone is trying to kill her, and she doesn't know who or why. How can she protect the man she's falling in love with if she can't remember who she is?

One thing is certain for both of them. Whatever her secrets and whatever danger they entail, Joshua knows he has to help Maggie find answers. For both their sakes.


AUTHOR'S NOTE

Once upon a time, in a publishing galaxy far, far away, I wrote two romantic suspense novels set in New Orleans. I was living in the city at the time and loved writing and researching both books. They were my first forays into suspense, and very different plots for me. Sadly, like all series romance novels, both were at bookstores for only four weeks, then they disappeared.

Fast forward to publishing today. A few years ago Lady of the Night and Bayou Midnight, the sequel, traveled across galaxies to my loving care once again. I was so glad to become reacquainted with my characters and stories.

Now what to do?

Time passes and styles change. My writing had changed, too, and I had moved away from romance to women's fiction. Both books needed to be updated and revised, but I knew right away they were worth it. More important, in order to finish the series, they needed the companionship of a third book, Night Magic, which I had planned to write, but never did. Unfortunately, Skeeter, the third of three childhood friends who grew up on the streets of New Orleans, was just a bit too much the bad boy for my publisher at the time. Although I didn't agree, I had to move on, and Skeeter's book languished.

Now I was faced with a decision. Was publishing these stories as a trilogy so important to me that I was willing to drop everything else, write the third book and dip back into romantic suspense? Darned right. I still had everything I needed in my files, as well as the conviction that this story wanted to be told. Clearly it was time to get moving.

So welcome to this galaxy and to New Orleans Nights, complete at last. Welcome to the seamier side of The City That Care Forgot, to the bayous of Southern Louisiana and to the underworld of New Orleans voodoo. Most of all to the stories of three men whose friendship never wavered.

While the first two books were updated and revised, and the third book written in the same time frame, the books are still set before Hurricane Katrina, which changed the city so drastically in August 2005. This is the New Orleans I remember and love so well.

I hope you'll enjoy reading this series as much as I enjoyed writing it, then and now.