Where There's Smoke

ANNOTATION

The phenomenal Sandra Brown weaves intrigue and mystery into the latest and most suspenseful of her 13 NYT bestsellers since 1990. Set against the background of a Texas oil empire. Dr. Lara Mallory takes over a medical practice left to her by a scion of the oil dynasty--a recent suicide. To offset community hostility, Lara seeks help from a man who may do her more harm than good. Advertising ties in with Brown's simultaneous new hardcover release, Charade.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Brown's fast-paced melodrama portrays a family oil empire in East Texas. Literary Guild main selection in cloth . (May)

Kirkus Reviews

More frustrated passion, political scandal, and true Texas grit from Brown—this featuring the simmering love-hate bond between cool, beautiful Dr. Laura Mallory and the savage blue-eyed younger brother of the politician whose life she reputedly destroyed. The mystery is why Dr. Mallory set up practice in Eden Pass, Texas, in the first place. The focus of a national scandal when she was photographed years before being escorted in her nightgown from young Senator Clark Tackett's Virginia home by her husband, Ambassador Randall Porter, Mallory and Porter were summarily banished to the no-account Caribbean nation of Montesangre—where Porter and their baby daughter were murdered in a rebel ambush, while Tackett drowned in a Texas fishing accident that may have been a suicide. Mallory returned to the States to find her professional name permanently sullied and, in desperation, accepted the modest doctor's home and office that a remorseful Tackett had deeded her in his tiny hometown of Eden Pass. Predictably, Mallory is shunned by a community ruled by Tackett's mother, Jody, the iron-willed widowed dowager of Tackett Oil and Gas. But the beautiful doctor accepts the situation, living meekly off her savings until Tackett's reckless, handsome younger brother, Key, returns from the Middle East. Then she goes to work to convince Key—who is, naturally, torn between loathing the good doctor and wanting to tear off her clothes—to fly her to Montesangre to locate the site of her daughter's grave. Murder, terror, dark hints of concealed homosexuality, and the shocking resurrection of husband Porter follow as the backdrop to Mallory and Key's romance ("I don't want to be one of KeyTackett's women." "Yes, you do. Tonight you do"), making for an unusually perilous and gruesome journey toward marriage and a house on the lake. More sophisticated than Brown's Texas! books, this mainstream romance could well expand her already enormous readership. (First printing of 250,000; Literary Guild Dual Selection for Spring)