LOVER'S KNOT by EMILIE RICHARDS

This book started out slowly for me. I guess I like the action to begin almost right away. Then part way through the book two skeletons are found wrapped in a quilt in a cave in the Shenandoah Blue Ridge mountains. Well I couldn't put the book down after that. I had to find out who these bodies were and how they got there!

Isaac Taylor was adopted at birth. His life has not been a good one. It has left  him with a workaholic attitude which helps him block out what he doesn't want to face or think about. He is left a quilt and a cabin by his birth grandmother who he'd never heard of. He will have nothing to do with these things but his wife, Kendra, a reporter, has the curiosity of a reporter wants to know more. After a shooting accident she moves to the cabin in Toms Brook to recover, alone, without her husband.

When it comes right down to it this story is about marriage, communication, family. It's also a story that shows how events in our lives, even negative ones, can help us see ourselves in a different light and help us see positives we didn't know were there. Emilie Richards does a great job, as usual, of tying present day to past through the use of bits of old letters, a quilt (of course), and a search for the answer to who the bodies are. The quilt is a Lover's Knot quilt but it is poorly quilted, on first inspection, and although it is made in a signature quilt style the signatures are all written and embroidered in the same hand. It is obvious that this quilt holds clues to something. Kendra goes in search of the message that has been left her husband by a grandmother he never knew.

As with the past two books in this series some of my favorite characters from the other books appear here and there throughout the story giving it continuity and building on what we knew of the characters and how their lives are progressing and changing.

I've already put in a request at the library for Emilie's next book, Touching Stars. I expect to be knee deep in it within a few days.

I still highly recommend this series and this author.