Summer in the Moon Garden

One summer. Two best friends. A list of everything they never got around to.

Kat Bauer has spent twenty years being the wife Richard wanted. Then a real estate agent shows up on her porch to sell the house she made a home, and her twin sons leave for nine weeks in the Alaskan wilderness with no phones. So Kat does what she's done every Memorial Day of her life: she drives three hours south to Criss Creek, Illinois, and the white farmhouse where her dad planted a garden of white flowers that bloom only at night.

Her best friend Jess is right where Kat left her, running Fred's Market, where Kat's card gets declined before she can say hello. Jess is carrying a husband who won't get off the couch. She's also carrying a lottery ticket worth ten million dollars, and she isn't telling anyone but Kat.

Under the Flower Moon, with a fire going and a tarot deck out, the two of them write a summer bucket list. Ride horses. Sing at Harvey's. Go camping. Stop settling.
Then Kat's first love pulls up in his truck, and the summer stops being a list.

Summer in the Moon Garden is an uplifting small-town novel about the friend who knew you first, starting over at forty-three, and the kind of love that waits. Gentle second-chance romance, midlife heroines, a litter of puppies born in a cemetery, and an ending that will make you want to call your best friend. For readers of Debbie Macomber, Viola Shipman, and Pamela Kelley.

A Criss Creek Novel. Each book stands alone, so start anywhere.