"A gripping story w/ plot twists and turns" Ghosts + #Romance #amreading #Book Review

It's always a thrill to hear a fellow author enjoyed your book!  Love this review left on BookBub for Gull Harbor, so I'm sharing it here!  Authors and editorial reviewers tend to leave more detailed reviews, since authors enjoy writing and editorial bloggers are doing their job...but we writers truly appreciate hearing someone liked a story even in a quick one-liner.  It's what keeps us going.  Writers often say they "write for themselves", and that was part of what started me on this journey with Silver Lake.  I had the plot in my head, I knew the characters intimately, scenes and dialog constantly ran through my mind, and in the end, my husband pushed me into trying.  I decided to see if I could do it, and I knew if I could get a publisher to contract my novel, I'd be fulfilling a lifelong dream.  

But even with that first book, my mantra was: "if one person contacts me to tell me they loved the story, I'll be happy" (and my friends and relatives, as much as I love them, didn't count for this).  And it happened.  The book didn't exactly go viral, but I did hear from a lot of readers and reviewers.  And eventually Amazon bought the rights to the book from my small publisher, and it got wider readership as a result of their marketing.  Truly a dream come true.

Nothing makes me happier than finding a great book that I can't put down.  I love racing through housework at night so I can snuggle under a blanket and read.  Even better is finding a book that's SO good I say "the dishes will still be there tomorrow" and keep turning the pages because I simply can't stop.  So now that I have readers asking for new stories, I write first and foremost for them.  Because writing is hard.  It's rewarding, to be sure, and a wonderful creative outlet, but writing a novel is not easy, and it takes precious time away from other things.  The majority of us don't make significant money in the process.  But as long as I have story ideas and readers asking for more, I'll try to keep at it, and hope my muse doesn't disappear completely!

I've gotten carried away writing here, as usual.  Please check out the review below, I hope anyone who enjoys some steamy romance with a spooky ghost mystery will give Gull Harbor a try!  It's a #1 Amazon and B&N Bestseller, and it's now available as an audiobook as well.  Thanks for stopping by! 

Gull Harbor is a gripping story with several plot twists and turns.  Claire, a former law student turned psychic, accepts a job to investigate an old mansion in a small Cape Cod town.  The experience turns out to be as much of a layered look into her own past as it is into the haunting of an empty house.  The last person she expects to meet in a town where all the locals know each other is the love of her life, Max, who walked out on her a few years earlier.  Claire never expected to see him again but now, being in such close proximity, all the questions, anger, and mixture of feelings she had for him have returned.

The ghost story and the renewed relationship of Claire and Max progress simultaneously and weave back and forth.  There is one other story though that neither Claire nor Max bargained on.  That is the one that puts Claire's life in danger, one that the ghost was trying to tell her about, and one that explains the dark secret of the mansion. 

~ Cynthia Collins, author of The Unicorn Tree