About Saving Grace
If you're at all inclined to be swept away to the islands to fall in love with a rainforest jumbie house and a Texas attorney who is as much a danger to herself as the island bad guys, then dive headfirst with Katie Connell into Saving Grace.
Katie escapes professional humiliation, a broken heart, and her Bloody Mary-habit when she runs to the island of St. Marcos to investigate the suspicious deaths of her parents. But she trades one set of problems for another when she is bewitched by the voodoo spirit Annalise in an abandoned rainforest house and, as worlds collide, finds herself reluctantly donning her lawyer clothes again to defend her new friend Ava, who is accused of stabbing her very married Senator-boyfriend.
AMAZON | BARNES & NOBLE
Life has thrown Katie Connell into a tailspin. Suffering from the mysterious loss of her parents, she is losing control. The man she's falling for, who also plays a pivotal role in her success as a lawyer, rebukes her. She finds comfort in liquid bravery and starts to spiral into the black hole of alcohol.
Escaping to St. Marcos, she decides to look into her parents' death. She finds a new friend, Ava, and an abandoned house. What starts as a few days away begins to shape up as a possible new life for Katie. After a series of unfortunate events, she's back in the courtroom defending her friend against a bogus murder charge. Can she save Ava while saving herself in the process? Will she find answers to her parents' accident?
An essential element of a great read is a character who takes you on an emotional journey--Katie does just that. There's a strength brewing under her pain. I wanted her to take her life back and put the alcohol away, and I wanted her to find the answers she so desperately needed. St. Marcos offered up some interesting characters, too, in the form of a Ava and the local police officer, Jacoby. (I hope the author is considering writing their story in a future book.)
At times, however, there were too many elements and subplots swirling around Katie--a house with mysterious forces, a not-convincing romance back home, a rape case, and so on. I felt most connected to the story when it focused on Katie's determination to uncover the mystery of her parents' death and her inner struggle to take her life back.
Life is all about the journey, and Saving Grace takes the reader on an emotionally charged adventure with interesting twists and turns along the way.
Rating: 3.5 stars
About Pamela Fagan Hutchins
Pamela Fagan Hutchins writes award-winning mysterious women’s fiction and relationship humor books, and holds nothing back. She is known for “having it all” which really means she has a little too much of everything, but loves it: writer, mediocre endurance athlete (triathlon, marathons), wife, mom of an ADHD & Asperger’s son, five kids/step-kids, business owner, recovering employment attorney and human resources executive, investigator, consultant, and musician. Pamela lives with her husband Eric and two high school-aged kids, plus 200 pounds of pets in Houston. Their hearts are still in St. Croix, USVI, along with those of their three oldest offspring.
Her latest book is the mystery/women’s fiction, Saving Grace.
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Excerpt
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Last
year sucked, and this one was already worse.
Last
year, when my parents died in an “accident” on their Caribbean
vacation, I’d been working too hard to listen to my instincts, which were
screaming “bullshit” so loud I almost went deaf in my third ear. I was preparing
for the biggest case of my career, so I sort of had an excuse that worked for me
as long as I showed up for happy hour, but the truth was, I was obsessed with
the private investigator assigned to my case.
Nick.
Almost-divorced Nick. My new co-worker Nick who sometimes sent out vibes that he
wanted to rip my Ann Taylor blouse off with his teeth, when he wasn’t busy
ignoring me.
But
things had changed.
I’d just
gotten the verdict back in my mega-trial, the Burnside wrongful termination
case. My firm rarely took plaintiff cases, so I’d taken a big risk with this
one—and won Mr. Burnside three million dollars, of which the firm got a third.
That was the total opposite of suck.
After my
coup at the Dallas
courthouse, my paralegal Emily and I headed straight down I-20 to the hotel
where our firm was on retreat in Shreveport,
Louisiana.
Shreveport is not
on the top ten list for most company getaways, but our senior partner fancied
himself a poker player, and loved Cajun food, jazz, and riverboat casinos. The
retreat was a great excuse for Gino to indulge in a little Texas Hold ’Em
between teambuilding and sensitivity sessions and still come off looking like a
helluva guy, but it meant a three and a half hour drive each way. This wasn’t a
problem for Emily and me. We bridged both the paralegal-to-attorney gap and the
co-worker-to-friend gap with ease, largely because neither of us did
Dallas-fancy very well. Or at all.
Emily
and I hustled inside for check-in at the Eldorado.
“Do you
want a map of the ghost tours?” the front desk clerk asked us, her polyglot
Texan-Cajun-Southern accent making tours sound like “turs.”
“Why,
thank you kindly, but no thanks,” Emily drawled. In the ten years since she’d
left, she still hadn’t shaken Amarillo from
her voice or given up barrel-racing horses.
I didn’t
believe in hocus pocus, either, but I wasn’t a fan of casinos, which reeked of
cigarette smoke and desperation. “Do y’all have karaoke or anything else but
casinos onsite?”
“Yes,
ma’am, we have a rooftop bar with karaoke, pool tables, and that kind of thing.”
The girl swiped at her bangs, then swung her head to put them back in the same
place they’d been.
“That
sounds more like it,” I said to Emily.
“Karaoke,”
she said. “Again.” She rolled her eyes. “Only if we can do tradesies halfway. I
want to play blackjack.”
After we
deposited our bags in our rooms and freshened up, talking to each other on our
cell phones the whole time we were apart, we joined our group. All of our
co-workers broke into applause as we entered the conference room. News of our
victory had preceded us. We curtsied, and I used both arms to do a Vanna White
toward Emily. She returned the favor.
“Where’s
Nick?” I called out. “Come on up here.”
Nick had
left the courtroom when the jury went out to deliberate, so he’d beaten us here.
He stood up from a table on the far side of the room, but didn’t join us in
front. I gave him a long distance Vanna White anyway.
The
applause died down and some of my partners motioned for me to sit with them at a
table near the entrance. I joined them and we all got to work writing a mission
statement for the firm for the next fifteen minutes. Emily and I had arrived
just in time for the first day’s sessions to end.
When we
broke, the group stampeded from the hotel to the docked barge that housed the
casino. In Louisiana,
gambling is only legal “on the water” or on tribal land. On impulse, I walked to
the elevator instead of the casino. Just before the doors closed, a hand jammed
between them and they bounced apart, and I found myself headed up to the hotel
rooms with none other than Nick Kovacs.
“So,
Helen, you’re not a gambler either,” he said as the elevator doors closed.
My stomach flipped. Cheesy, yes, but when he was in a good mood, Nick called me Helen—as in Helen of Troy.
I had
promised to meet Emily for early blackjack before late karaoke, but he didn’t
need to know that. “I have the luck of the Irish,” I said. “Gambling is
dangerous for me.”
He
responded with dead silence. Each of us looked up, down, sideways, and anywhere
but at each other, which was hard, since the elevator was mirrored above a gold
handrail and wood paneling. There was a wee bit of tension in the
air.
“I heard
there’s a pool table at the hotel bar, though, and I’d be up for that,” I
offered, throwing myself headlong into the void and holding my breath on the way
down.
Dead
silence again. Long, dead silence. The ground was going to hurt when I hit
it.
Without
making eye contact, Nick said, “OK, I’ll meet you there in a few minutes.”
Did he
really say he’d meet me there? Just the two of us? Out together? Oh my God,
Katie, what have you done?
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Book Trailer
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Giveaway
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Please visit other stops on the Saving Grace blog tour page.
Thanks to Pump Up Your Book for including me on this blog
tour.
Note: I received a complimentary copy from Pump Up
Your Book for review purposes. No other compensation was received. A positive
review was not guaranteed or requested; the views expressed are my
own.
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