There are some places you must return to...

Friendship, betrayal, forgiveness, and love. Places By The Sea is the story of the struggle to merge the old and the new, and the question of what it means to have it all...even when a dark family secret is about to be revealed

JILL: A glamorous Boston newswoman, she leads a charmed life with a hugely successful TV show, two beautiful children, and a fiancé who just happens to be her sexy prime-time co-host. Yet now, when Jill's future has never looked brighter and all her dreams seem to be coming true, her past is calling her back...to an island, a house, a life she wants only to forget, yet could give this savvy reporter the story of a lifetime.

RITA: Once they were best friends; now Rita and Jill are as opposite as the high and low tides that edge the shores of their Martha's Vineyard homeland. From cleaning cottages to selling real estate, redheaded Rita knows what it takes to survive life on the island, and she's willing to do just about anything to do it...unless it involves having to turn to her old, estranged friend.

BEN: He derives a shiny old Buick and wears a Red Sox baseball cap: steady, rugged, local carpenter Ben, wants only to master his craft, build a museum for the island kids, and quietly adjust to the loss of his wife...until his life is interrupted with unwanted turmoil...and unexpected choices.

For several years I owned a home on Cape Cod, across the sound from Martha's Vineyard. The island always intrigued me: who were the people who actually lived there? What happened to those who left and never returned...or to those who had the courage to go back?

I often boarded the Island Queen out of Falmouth for a "day trip" to the Vineyard. I roamed around the gingerbread houses of Oak Bluffs, the narrow hillside streets of Vineyard Haven, and the quaint shops of Edgartown in search of something, though I had no idea what.

Now I know I was looking for my future! Places By The Sea is the first of many of my books to take place on the island –– each continues to be a labor of love and fills me with a warm sense of always "going home."

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