The big question in LAKESIDE COTTAGE is -- is celebrity all that it's cracked up to be. I guess it depends on the celebrity. Sergeant JD Harris doesn't enjoy celebrity, in fact he despises it and with good reason. It has robbed him of a personal life. Seems like a pretty high price to pay for someone who was doing what they were trained to do and acting pretty much on instinct. Just how much of his personal life is the public entitled to once his picture is front page news. So in an effort to disappear from the public eye he winds up at a remote lake renovating a friend's boat and enjoying some solitude while deciding what he will do next with his life.

Kate Livingston's career just took an abrupt nosedive. So her choices are to feel sorry for herself or regroup. Her life has been a series of regroups so she can handle one more. Even though the rest of her rather large family can't make it to the family lakeside cottage this season, she is going with her son so they can both get away from the remnants of a rather discouraging year and hopefully return reinvigorated. Being at the lake is catharsis for many of the characters of LAKESIDE COTTAGE. While many of the characters chose this site to spend their summer in an attempt to find solitude what they found was just the opposite. Now the problem is whether or not to accept the changes that would have to be made in their lives in order to further these new relationships.

LAKESIDE COTTAGE by Susan Wiggs is true to her style of developing multi-dimensional characters. In this book she incorporates some very current national security dilemmas that still make most of us rather nervous. The idea of suicide or homicide bombs whether used by a world terrorist or by a disgruntled worker is a very sensitive subject and yet Wiggs decided to involve her characters in what we could call a byproduct of one of these events. The characters had great inner strength, even though they initially think otherwise. We are brought along for the ride as they discover their strengths and find the light at the end of the tunnel.