Synopsis:
Her husband, Mark, a successful Manhattan psychiatrist, recently drowned in a sailing accident. In the wake of that tragedy, Cassie Costas’s relationship with her teenage stepdaughter, Savannah, unraveled. Cassie hoped that moving back to historic Tarpon Springs, Florida, and the support of her large Greek-American family would help heal Savannah’s wounds . . . and their relationship. But Savannah hates her new home, new school, and — most of all — Cassie, whom she blames for her father’s death.
Meanwhile, Cassie is futilely searching for answers about the man with whom she shared her life. In addition to her inability to find a path back to Savannah’s heart, she can’t find a trace of the family’s missing investments.
Savannah’s rebellion culminates in an act that leaves single mother Amber Blair and her sixteen-year-old son, Will, homeless. When Cassie learns what transpired, she is determined to set things right. And teach Savannah that actions have consequences. So she invites the two strangers to move in with her and Savannah until Amber can get back on her feet.
As their lives intertwine and friendships develop, Amber’s evasiveness about her past and the fear in her eyes hint at a dark story. As Cassie discovers the devastating secrets that Mark kept from her, she wonders what the pretty, personable woman living under her roof is running from . . .and what will happen if it finally catches up to her.
By welcoming strangers into her home, has Cassie thrown open her front door to danger?
Be careful who crosses your threshold.
Review:
USA Today bestselling author Emilie Richards has penned more than seventy novels, including several series, that have been published in sixteen languages. A graduate of Florida State, she also hold a master’s degree in family development from Virginia Tech. Before becoming a full-time writer, she was a therapist in a mental health center, Vista community organizer, and coordinator for Head Start. She has served as a speaker at workshops and conferences, and continuing education teacher at the University of New Orleans. She relates, “It’s a blessing and a curse to be interested in everything and want to try it all. I’ve written series romances, romantic suspense, futuristic fantasy, mysteries, and single title women’s fiction. I’ve penned light books, dramatic books, . . .”
Richards was raised in Gulfport, Florida, about thirty miles from Tarpon Springs, the setting of her latest book, The House Guests. She says the story was inspired by an idea that had been “tugging” at her for years after reading about a woman who was rendered homeless when she lost her rent money. Also “tugging” at her were memories of an elementary school field trip to the Sponge Docks of Tarpon Springs, where she watched a “sponge diver in a deep sea diving suit and helmet demonstrating how sponges were harvested.” To write the book, she returned to Tarpon Springs to learn about the Greek-Americans who settled the town and still make up a large portion of its population, as well as Greek culture and food. During her visits, she observed the annual Epiphany celebration, and sampled the cuisine, including moussaka, pastitsio, horiatiki salad, and baklava. Her research brings credibility and believability to a story that is both charming and suspenseful.
As the book opens, Amber Blair is down on her luck. Again. She has been on the move since before her sixteen-year-old son, Will, was born. Tarpon Springs, Florida, is her latest stop. She was hired to manage a restaurant, but it remained closed for an extended period of time when Amber and other employees contracted hepatitis. Health insurance being a luxury she has never been able to afford, she wracked up a hospital bill and fell behind on her rent. But with her health finally improving and being back at work, she has saved up enough money to pay one month of the back rent and made an arrangement with her landlord to pay the remainder due. She also sells homemade items on Etsy such as the zipper pouch created from a brocade jacket and embroidered with the name of her landlord’s wife into which she has stuffed the wad of cash she plans to give the landlord. But disaster strikes when she stops by the local thrift shop in search of more vintage clothing she can repurpose for crafts, opens her purse, and discovers the pouch is gone. Her search for it is futile, and the landlord is out of patience. Once again, she and Will find themselves packing up their car. Amber reserves a spot for them at a local campground where they can sleep in side-by-side tents until she can save up enough money to again secure housing for them.
Fifteen-year-old Savannah Westmore hates everything about her life. Before moving to Tarpon Springs, she was expelled from the prestigious school she attended in Manhattan. No one, including her beloved father, Mark, a psychiatrist, believed her version of events. After a fight between Mark and her stepmother, Cassie, about their savings account that Savannah overheard, Mark, an expert sailor, went out in his boat, despite bad weather. He drowned, and Savannah blames Cassie, believing that her father would never have gone sailing that day were it not for the quarrel. Cassie and her father married when Savannah was just three years old and her father always had custody of her, although she visits her physician mother at her Palm Springs home during school breaks. After Mark’s death, Cassie purchased a home in Tarpon Springs in order to be surrounded by her loving Greek family and enrolled Savannah in Coastal winds, the local public high school. But Savannah is no longer interested in her studies and has been befriended by two girls who, like Savannah, are social outcasts. When they find a pouch containing eight hundred dollars in the parking lot across from the thrift store, Helia convinces Minh and Savannah to throw a party at Cassie’s house while she is out of town. Cassie returns to find her beautiful new home defiled, and Savannah severely hung over.
Cassie also finds an embroidered pouch in the garbage can . . . that matches the one depicted in the newspaper article that Travis, a distant cousin and local journalist, has just published. Travis convinced the woman who is the subject of the article to let him write a story about how she and her son were evicted from their apartment after the woman lost the pouch containing the rent money she worked so hard to amass. Cassie learns the woman’s identity and location from Travis, finds her at the campsite where she and her son are settling in, and convinces her that they must stay with her and Savannah. After all, it was only because of the immature, irresponsible actions of Savannah and her friends that Amber and Will have become homeless.
So begins an endearing tale of loss, friendship, survival, and what it means to be a family. Richards has crafted characters who are empathetic and believable. All four of the main characters — Cassie, Savannah, Amber, and Will — find themselves at crossroads. Cassie and Savannah were both devastated by Mark’s death. For Savannah, who had a close, loving relationship with her father, grief has been fueled by anger and disappointment. Mark did not believe her when she related her version of the events at school that culminated in her expulsion. From her perspective, he also convinced Cassie that she was lying. Both of them noticed a profound change in Mark’s personality and their relationships with him in the year preceding his death. He became irritable, withdrawn, uninterested in their lives. They were at a loss as to why their attentive, doting husband and father became so distant and disconnected from them. With his sudden and tragic death, they were deprived of the opportunity to understand and repair their family dynamic. Worse, Cassie believed that Mark’s successful practice had made them financially secure, and she is stunned to learn that, after using the bulk of the proceeds from Mark’s life insurance policy, she has little money left. She knew Mark drained and closed their savings account, but when she learns that all of their investments and retirement accounts are gone, as well, she can “no longer sit back and mourn for her husband. It is time to find out if the man she’d loved for so many years was really the man she’s thought him to be.” Richards compassionately details Cassie’s journey from a wife content to let her husband manage the family finances to an independent woman who must take responsibility for all aspects of her own life and well-being. For Cassie, the answers are elucidating, as well as heartbreaking and, ultimately, empowering.
Richards also depicts Savannah’s evolution from a comfortable girl with every advantage necessary to ensure success and happiness to a rebellious, resentful, and distinctly ungrateful teenager. In Savannah’s mind, her hatred of Cassie, her stepmother, is justified. She doesn’t want to live in Tarpon Springs with Cassie, especially after Amber and Will move in and she is forced to relinquish her large bedroom suite to them. She just wants to mark time until she turns eighteen and can escape. To what? She has no idea, but she is convinced her life will magically improve. She is naive and gullible in many respects, but also intelligent, insightful, and full of promise if she can work through her grief and find equilibrium. And realize that not all parents are genetically connected to their children. Rather, the act of parenting is much more complicated and demanding than simply creating a life.
Injecting clues about Amber’s past at deftly-paced intervals, Richards keeps readers engaged in the mystery. Amber is not her real name and she is determined to protect Will from someone who does not know she has a son. She has moved with Will from place to place over the years, never daring to settle in one location for too long. “Her feelings didn’t matter, hadn’t mattered for years. Survival had demanded that she push everything aside except the rules she’s made for herself. Stay under the radar. Move often and without fanfare. Keep to the simplest facts about who she and Will were and where they’d come from.” But as she and Cassie get to know each other, and Cassie’s family members welcome her and Will into their midst, Amber finds herself wondering if she and Will can safely remain in Tarpon Springs. Will has developed friendships and is a stabilizing influence on Savannah. He is doing well in school, and emphatically wants to stay. Hard-working and unfailingly loyal to Amber, he enjoys his job at Kouzina, the restaurant owned and operated by Yiayia, Cassie’s grandmother, and widowed aunt, Roxanne. But he is weary of Amber’s deflection when he asks about his father, spurred on to demand answers by Savannah, who insists that he has a right to know about his parentage and family. As Amber scrambles to shield Will from danger, she also tries to resist her growing attraction to Travis and remain realistic about the prospect of staying in one place permanently. Aside from Cassie, there is only one person on earth who knows the truth about why Amber has been on the run for so many years, and what might happen if the person looking for her ever finds her . . . and learns of Will’s existence. “She had covered her tracks more than a dozen times and taken twists and turns on the journey. She had changed her name and appearance.” But now that individual might be in danger, as well.
The book’s location serves as a vibrant additional character, especially the Kouzina and its bickering proprietors, Yiayia and Roxanne. The voices of Richards’ characters are just right, especially the teenagers who manage to get themselves into mischief that escalates as the story’s even pace accelerates toward a heart-stopping resolution, with all secrets revealed and the characters’ futures determined.
The House Guests is a thoroughly engrossing and entertaining story about four characters’ transitions, against their wills, from the lives they were living into futures they neither envisioned nor designed. But that’s the point. They all learn that some things in life are beyond one’s control and they must adapt in order to survive and, hopefully, find happiness.
Excerpt from The House Guests
1
Amber Blair had spent most of her thirty-four years trying not to think about luck. Her daddy had told her there were only two kinds. Either you came into the world with the luck of the early bird or the early worm. The kind he’d been born with was obvious. Nothing that had gone wrong in all his years had to do with simply hanging around the edges of life, waiting for something good to fall in his lap. It was all about luck.
Her mother, tight-lipped and seething, had rarely voiced opinions. As a receptionist at the Halfway to Paradise motel, she had been too busy checking people in, and giving out room keys—and probably a little extra—to worry about luck.
Like most people, Amber had acquired something from both parents. She had inherited her father’s early worm luck, oddly coupled with her mother’s work ethic. Against tremendous odds she had scrambled to support herself and her son on her feet in restaurants, instead of on her back in cheap motels. Her mother had been remote and disinterested, but years of watching her determination to survive had helped.
“Haven’t seen you for a while.” The manager at the cash register of Things From the Springs greeted Amber with a wide smile. She was middle-aged and overweight, refreshingly unaware that spandex and sequins weren’t good choices for minimizing either. Her plastic nameplate read Ida, but Amber had never told Ida her own name, a habit she’d developed after leaving home at sixteen. Still, Ida never forgot a face.
“It has been a while,” Amber said.
“You feeling better?”
Amber wasn’t surprised that Ida remembered the day two months before when she had fainted facedown in the women’s clothing aisle, strawberry blond hair spread wide on a table stacked with shorts and T-shirts. The manager had insisted Amber go right to the hospital. Amber had thanked her, then headed to work instead. Three days later, though, she had seen a doctor after Will, her son, gazed at her in horror and announced that her green eyes were rimmed by an ominous yellow.
Of course, the news hadn’t been good. Hepatitis A had arrived with a flourish, and she had been so dehydrated that, despite all her protests, she’d been hospitalized for a day, a bill that had nearly sunk them.
Health insurance was a luxury she had never indulged in.
“Yes. Definitely better,” she said now. She didn’t add that she still tired easily or that she was struggling to regain the weight she’d lost. Jaundice, the colorful bonus, was finally gone, and she was back at work.
“You were caught up in that hepatitis thing, weren’t you? The one at that restaurant…” The manager snapped her fingers. “Electric something?”
“Dine Eclectic.”
“You closed for a while, right?”
Because two of the kitchen staff had also been infected, Dine Eclectic, the much promoted addition to restaurants in Tarpon Springs, Florida, had closed until health inspectors had given permission to reopen. Amber had been forbidden to go back to work until the jaundice and other symptoms disappeared. During most of the weeks of illness, she had been far too sick to work even if she’d wanted to. She certainly had needed to, because from an armchair in the apartment she shared with sixteen-year-old Will, she’d watched the savings she had so carefully hoarded dwindle to nothing.
“We’ve been open again for a while now,” she said. “We’ve passed all the inspections. The problem was an infected line cook. Luckily hepatitis A is almost never fatal.”
“I imagine the publicity wasn’t good for business.”
More customers arrived, and Amber headed for the rear of the store and the men’s section.
Things From the Springs was smaller than many thrift stores she’d frequented. They were loosely affiliated with a local children’s charity, and volunteers did much of the sorting and pricing.
She liked visiting Things because she could be in and out in less than an hour, often with vintage clothing she could cut and use for crafts to sell in her Etsy shop. An example was tucked securely in her purse today, a zipper pouch created from a brocade jacket and embroidered with the name of her landlord’s wife. It had turned out so well she posted a photo on her shop’s page, hoping to get orders for more.
The pouch bulged with money, mostly tips she had carefully collected to pay one of the two months of back rent she owed. Even after she’d showed her suspicious landlord a letter from the health department, he had begun eviction proceedings. She had managed to stave him off, promising to pay the first month today and the second in two weeks. She hoped the additional gift for his wife might make him feel better about his decision.
Her son had been more than patient during her months of unemployment. Will was a straight A student at the local high school and held down a part-time job stocking shelves at a local grocery store. He had taken on additional hours during her illness and brought home expired or damaged food that was destined for salvage stores or landfills. He had treated his quest like a treasure hunt and never wished out loud that his life was more like the easier ones of the other teens in his advanced placement classes.
Will wasn’t perfect. He was sometimes messy, sometimes oblivious, often determined his way was best, but they’d been a team, just the two of them, from the very beginning of his life. And Amber knew her son would do anything for her, just as she had done everything for him. Much more than Will knew.
Today if she had early bird luck, she was going to buy him a surprise. Things From the Springs had a special rack dedicated to sports teams, and there was always a good selection. She was hoping to find one with the pirate flag of Will’s favorite professional football team, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. For the first time, her tips from the night before had been nearly as large as pre-hepatitis days, and she was hopeful she might be digging her way out of trouble. She would be happy just to pay rent on time, put a full tank of gas in the car and buy fresh food at the grocery store now and then.
Fifteen minutes later she was on her way back to the front of the now-empty store, a paper-thin but appropriately logoed T-shirt clutched under her arm. The size and price were right, and while Will wouldn’t get much wear before it fell apart, he would be delighted.
She was starting to feel lucky. Her landlord had begrudgingly given her a little time to settle their account. After everything she still had her job, and restaurant traffic showed signs of improving. Today she had just enough extra to buy the shirt.
“You found something,” Ida said. “I saw you heading to the back.”
“It’s for my son.” Amber laid the shirt on the long counter. “He’s a Bucs fan.”
“These have been going fast. Apparently, he’s not alone.” She rang up the amount as Amber reached down to unzip her purse.
Only the purse wasn’t zipped.
She spread it wide and peered inside. Without ceremony and with more than a touch of panic, she dumped the contents on the counter. Keys fell out. A pack of tissues. Her tiny coin purse, which held the extra money she hadn’t put into the zip purse destined for the landlord and his wife. Nothing else.
“Run into a problem?”
Amber gazed at the concerned woman’s face. “I had a zipper pouch in here, dark green silk, a name embroidered across it.”
Ida read her expression correctly. “Did you open your purse here in the store? Could the pouch have fallen out?”
Amber knew she’d had the zipper pouch when she left her apartment. She’d so carefully slipped it inside the purse. Surely she’d zipped it closed. She always did. She had lived in cities with pickpockets. But by now panic had obliterated all memories of the past hour.
“I had it when I left my house.”
“We’ll look together.” As Amber scraped her belongings back into her purse, the manager walked to the door, turned the lock and flipped the Closed sign.
“That will buy us some time. We’ll find it.”
Half an hour later, though, they were still empty-handed. They’d looked under tables, sorted through all the shirts in the back, followed Amber’s route through the store four separate times peering at the ground.
“I’m so sorry,” Ida said. “But I have to unlock the front door. The high school lets out about now. They’ll start banging on the glass. I just know you’re
going to find it somewhere. Your house or car maybe?”
Amber knew she wasn’t. The truth was a tight knot in her stomach, all too familiar. She’d been slapped down again. The landlord wouldn’t believe her, and who could blame him? He probably didn’t need the money right away, but he would be furious she’d lied to him.
She and Will would see that eviction notice after all.
“Thank you for helping me look.” Amber cleared her throat. “I don’t think I’ll buy the shirt.”
“Why don’t I just let you have it?”
“No.” Amber took a breath and softened her tone. “But thank you.”
She followed the manager to the front door as she unlocked it. “You’ll let me know when you find it?” Ida asked.
Amber managed the tiniest of smiles. But in her mind she saw the early worm being swallowed, inch by wiggling inch. And somewhere, after the meal, a fat, happy robin was looking for more just like it.
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