Margot Cary has it all! She is an events planner at ELITE ELEGANCE in the Windy City. She loves her job and has a glowing reputation in Chicago. Margot is hoping with the success of her latest event that she will be offered a partnership in the Company. However, disaster strikes when the phony French Chef hired for the affair builds his own creative Tower of Shrimp and serves it to the hostess who has a deadly allergy to seafood. The event is ruined and Margo is fired! News of the event's flop travels fast and Margot is unable to obtain any work. Now jobless, almost homeless, Margot is embarrassed and her future looks grim. Not one response from her many applications for work has arrived and she is panicked.
When she receives a phone call from Aunt Tootie, a relative on her father's side, Margo is surprised. After her parents divorced, she moved with her mother to Chicago. Her mother did not discuss her father except to say he was a drunk and did not take responsibility for his daughter seriously. When Aunt Tootie offered Margo to join the family business, McCready Family funeral, and Bait shop in the small Southern town of Lake Sackett, Margot accepts. She has no other options, so she packs and heads South. She discovers a huge, giving, and loving family in this backwater town and has many decisions to make about her future
Molly Harper tells a bittersweet story of family, second chances, and finding what makes you happy. A colorful cast of characters includes Sam McCready, her father who along with patience and much soul searching by both he and Margot, find a path back to each other and a bright, new beginning. The sad-eyed but handsome school principal, Kyle Archer, is pure delight. As a widower trying his best to raise two adorable young daughters, he falls in love with Margot and is a charming Southern gentleman, who is hard to resist. This is not what Margot wants or is it? It is difficult to resist the joy that is Juniper and Hazel and Kyle are just the sweetest icing on the cake. Margot is not prepared either to be adopted by Arlo, the sweet furry cutey pie that fell in love with her at first sight and refuses to give up loving her.
This is a funny tale of Southern living complete with Oh! so sweet tea, Oh! so tangy coffee! and too much of deep-fried everything! A dying economy, tourists getting fewer each year, petty politics, everyone knows and sees everything, but somehow they cling together and love each other without reservations. Small-time life brings happiness, joy and dreams come true in Lake Sackett. "Bless her heart", Ms. Harper has a hit with SWEET TEA AND SYMPATHY. I enjoyed it and so will you.
Beloved author Molly Harper launches a brand-new contemporary romance series, Southern Eclectic, with this story of a big-city party planner who finds true love in a small Georgia town. Nestled on the shore of Lake Sackett, Georgia is the McCready Family Funeral Home and Bait Shop. (What, you have a problem with one-stop shopping?) Two McCready brothers started two separate businesses in the same building back in 1928, and now it’s become one big family affair. And true to form in small Southern towns, family business becomes everybody’s business. Margot Cary has spent her life immersed in everything Lake Sackett is not. As an elite event planner, Margot’s rubbed elbows with the cream of Chicago society, and made elegance and glamour her business. She’s riding high until one event goes tragically, spectacularly wrong. Now she’s blackballed by the gala set and in dire need of a fresh start—and apparently the McCreadys are in need of an event planner with a tarnished reputation. As Margot finds her footing in a town where everybody knows not only your name, but what you had for dinner last Saturday night and what you’ll wear to church on Sunday morning, she grudgingly has to admit that there are some things Lake Sackett does better than Chicago—including the dating prospects. Elementary school principal Kyle Archer is a fellow fish-out-of-water who volunteers to show Margot the picture-postcard side of Southern living. The two of them hit it off, but not everybody is happy to see an outsider snapping up one of the town's most eligible gentleman. Will Margot reel in her handsome fish, or will she have to release her latest catch?