Blue Dahlia by Nora Roberts

This is the first of a trilogy still in process and is based on Nora Roberts’ love for gardening. This will again be about three women and the way they find their loves. The focus of this book is on Stella, who lost her husband in a plane crash (bizarrely in September 2001, but doesn’t even mention 9/11) and is raising two little boys. She decides to leave her home in Michigan and move to Tennessee, where she gets a job at a garden shop run by Roz, a wealthy lady who has decided to turn her love of gardening into a business. Stella comes in and organizes things better, rearranges the store, and they have a record year. Logan is the landscaper, who doesn’t take well to being organized, but he somehow still falls in love with this women with red hair and two comic and fun loving boys. Opposites attract, etc. The third woman, Haley, a distant relative, shows up on their doorstep pregnant and wanting a job, though she originally worked in a bookstore. (Both of those two business are appealing to me, and I actually got to try out one of them.) Looks like her love will be Harper, Roz’s son, who lives in a cottage on the grounds and is their plant propagator. He’s there when Haley gives birth to Lily. Roz’s love may or may not be Mitch, a genealogy specialist she hires towards the end of the book to research not only her family tree, but specifically the ghost that has been haunting her house – protective of kids, but mad when Stella decides to marry Logan. The prologue tells us who she is. (Read Jan. 05)