Michelle Major (Fortune's Fresh Start) begins a warmhearted series with The Magnolia Sisters. Avery Keller, 30 years old and living in San Francisco, has her life disrupted when she loses her high-powered job in risk analysis and learns the man she loves is already married, with a family. Avery receives another unexpected jolt when she gets word that her birth father, a man whom Avery always believed knew nothing about her existence, has died and left her an inheritance. In order to claim it, Avery sets off for Magnolia, N.C., where she learns about her father, Niall Reed--a once prominent artist and serial philanderer--whose lucrative paintings, in his heyday, captured enough acclaim for him to buy up a lot of property in town.
Avery's revelations don't end there. She learns she has two half-sisters--Magnolia natives who didn't know they shared the same father--who are also beneficiaries of Niall's patrimony. Wise-cracking 29-year-old animal-rescuer Meredith is drawn to fitted T-shirts, cargo pants and boots, while 28-year-old artistic Carrie--the only one of the sisters who was raised by their father--looks and acts like a "perfect Southern belle." The three vastly different women grapple with their new identities, each other and how best to handle Niall's fortune without disrupting the small-town dynamic. Along the way, Avery falls for a handsome, divorced firefighter embroiled in a messy custody battle for his precocious daughter.
A large cast of well-drawn characters and a host of intriguing story threads enlarge the hopeful, heartfelt charm of Major's engrossing new romance series. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines