The Peach Keeper by Sarah Addison Allen

The Peach Keeper is our book discussion book for February. I have to say I really enjoyed this book. I never know with the book discussion books. I try to pick books that sound interesting and that will hopefully appeal to the group. If anyone is interested in coming the meeting is February 21, 2012 at 10:30am. I will be making oatmeal cookies with coffee icing. The recipe is from the book and found on the authors website.

Walls of Water, North Caroline, where the secrets are thicker than the fog from the town's famous waterfalls, and the stuff of superstition is just as real as you want it to be.

Doesn't that just make you want to read more?

Willa Jackson is thirty years old and she hails from a fine old Southern family that met with financial ruin generations ago. The Blue Ridge Madam-built by Willa's great-great-grandfather during Walls of Water's heyday, and once the town's grandest home-has stood for years as a lonely monument to misfortune and scandal. Willa has long strived to build a life beyond the brooding Jackson family shadow, which is no easy task in a town shaped by years of tradition and the well marked boundaries between the haves and the have-nots.

Recently Willa has learned that an old classmate, socialite do-gooder Paxton Osgood, of the very prominent Osgood family, has restored the Blue Ridge Madam to her former glory, with plans to open a top-flight inn. Willa hopes that the troubled past can be laid to rest while something new and wonderful rises from the ashes but what rises instead is a skeleton buried beneath the property's lone peach tree. Once it is unearthed it raises a lot of questions for the Jackson's and the Osgood's. Because once upon a time Willa's and Paxton's grandmothers were best friends and they may know something about the buried bones, those of charismatic traveling salesman Tucker Devlin, who worked his dark charms seventy five years ago.

This throws Willa and Paxton into an unlikely friendship. Willa has a chance at love with Paxton's brother Colin. While Paxton has her own relationship woes with Sebastian. My favorite books have romance so I'm glad there were two love stories going on along with a mystery and a bit of magic. I think I'm going to be checking out Ms. Allen's other books. I'm intrigued.