Sunday, June 12, 2011

Tassy Morgan's Bluff by Jim Stinson

Book Description:
San Andreas, California. It may be a quaint town, but its residents have high hopes for its future as a tourist destination. There's Bill the Fixer, the handyman who sidelines in chain-saw sculpted redwood totem poles; real estate agent Margaret Nam, who plans to make a mint rehabbing beach shacks; and Jimi, the well-to-do hairstylist whose chair is the epicenter of town gossip. Amid their town's growing pains, widower Lincoln Ellis and Tassy Morgan, a recently divorced painter, meet and-much to their surprise-sparks begin to fly.

This light read filled with quirky characters thrown together by improbable circumstances was a delightful summer read. The setting is great, the small town politics accurate, and the cast of characters is truly original. Tassy and Linc make a great couple and I loved reading about their efforts to maintain Tassy's dilapidated cottage in the face of machinations by the town council.

My only quibble is that the end of the book seems rather sudden and doesn't tie up all the lose ends for the characters other than Tassy and Linc. If this is the start of a series with more books to follow that flesh out the rest of the oddballs introduced here, then I would bump it up to 5 stars.

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