Truth and Solace*
Compelling Third Installment of Excellent Series
After Lies and Secrets (books 1 and 2), we finally have Truth in the Love at Solace Lake series. Maggie, the youngest of the Lindquist daughters, is the heroine of this second-chance-at-romance story. When she was a young teenager, she fell in love was a young man named Luke who was a few years older than she was. After dumping her in a most dramatic and painful fashion, he went to California for schooling and ultimately got a job there. He comes back to the Minnewasta area because his mother is terminally ill with lung cancer. He works in hotel and restaurant management and has agreed to do that temporarily at the lodge so he can be with his mother in Minnesota. Because of their respective jobs in the lodge, Luke and Maggie often work together, which is not always easy for Maggie. They have so much shared history and still-existent feelings for each other, but there are also hurt and abandonment issues.
Will Maggie be able to look beyond the past hurts? Can Maggie and Luke find love again as adults? How will Luke deal with his mother’s illness? What truths will be revealed?
Yet again, the author has written a fantastic book. The past backstory and the current plotlines weave together and mirror each other in a complex way that was beautifully done.
I was wondering how she was going to handle the first chapter, which in the other two books of the series showed the sisters’ parents’ deaths from that book’s heroine’s perspective. But I knew that Maggie was just a baby when her parents died. In this book instead, Maggie gets into a fight with her grandmother about Luke just before her grandmother dies, causing Maggie to feel guilty that she may have caused her heart attack.
In this book, you will finally learn the truth about the death of the girls’ parents as well as the truth about Maggie’s parentage, which was hinted at in the prior book. Another truth revealed in the book is the reason why Luke left back when they were younger.
Yet again, this author is not afraid to address difficult and taboo topics, which are not common in contemporary romance. In this book, she looks at sexual harassment, parental abandonment, cancer, and marital infidelity as well as continuing to address alcoholism. Even though there are many hard topics she explores, she does so with sensitivity and compassion.
If you enjoyed either of the first two books of the series, you will find answers to the questions raised in them, told in the compelling way you have come to expect from this author. If you haven’t read the other books and enjoyed heartfelt contemporary romance, I suggest you start with Book 1 and make it to this one because the journey of the characters in these novels is amazing to watch unfold.
