Trust Me

Eve Elliot is a successful therapist, a loving wife, a mother deeply invested in her family—but her happiness is built on a lie. When she was a lonely, vulnerable young woman, a single decision led to a dark night of unimaginable consequences. Now, forced to confront her past, she faces another terrible choice: reveal to her family that she is not who she seems, or allow a man to take the blame for a crime she knows he did not commit.

Corinne Elliot has always known she was different: the only redhead in a family of brunettes, the paralyzing shyness that contrasts with her sister's vivaciousness, the many fears—of highways, of bridges, of public spaces—that constrict her daily life. Still, she's found some measure of happiness—until the day she turns on the television and finds her mother's image on the screen.

Now, as the past explodes into the present, Corinne must confront the secrets she has always intuited, and find answers from the one person who knows the truth—a woman named CeeCee Wilkes, who disappeared years ago….

Publishers Weekly

The inaugural Skye Kellerman novel from Novak (Dead Right, etc.) generates genuine thrills. Attacked four years ago at home by rapist and murderer Oliver Burke, Skye defended herself and put him behind bars. Inspired by her own struggle, Skye began the Last Stand-an organization focused on helping survivors and teaching self-defense. She is also wrestling with an attraction to the detective from her case, David Willis. When Burke cuts a deal, the fiend is out on the street, eager for revenge on Skye-who has been the focus of his continued obsession. Novak changes the pace by focusing on the families-of the victim, of Willis, of Burke-showing different sides of protective love. Skye's fellow members of the Last Stand get short shrift, but readers will look forward to books in the series devoted to each woman. (June)

Most writers say they've had stories running around in their head since they can remember, but that wasn't the case for Brenda. She grew up thinking she didn't have a creative bone in her body. She considered herself "left-brained," with talents in science and mathematics, and even went to school for business.

It wasn't until she was 29 and married with three kids that she discovered writing— and if not for a difficult situation that prompted her to find a way to make money from home, she might not have started even then.

Brenda was a loan officer for a mortgage company when she caught her in-home daycare provider drugging her children with cough medicines and Tylenol to get them to sleep while she was gone. They'd been waking up several times in the night and she couldn't figure out why. Except for the baby, they were too old for that. But once she found the medicine in her baby's bottle, she suspected the baby-sitter had been doing this for several months.

No longer able to trust someone else with her children's well-being, Brenda quit her job to stay home with them—but her husband's business was failing and she needed to find some way to help him financially. That's when she decided to write a book.

It wasn't the "quick fix" the Novaks were hoping for. It took her five years to teach herself the craft and to finish her debut novel, Of Noble Birth, published in November 1999. But it introduced her to something she loves to do more than anything else. Shortly after she sold Of Noble Birth, she sold three books to Harlequin's Superromance line, the first of which, Expectations, came out in February2000.

Now she has five children; three girls and two boys, and juggles her writing career with softball games and field trips, carpool runs and homework sessions, and trying to keep up with her active husband. Fortunately, her family is as involved in what she does as she is in their activities. Her husband or one of her daughters sometimes go to conferences with her, they put stamps on the postcards she sends to her mailing list when she has a new book come out, and they come to all her book signings.

Her oldest, Ashley, throws her backpack down when she gets home from school and immediately joins Brenda at her computer, wanting to hear the latest installment on her current work in progress. Ashley gives Brenda valuable feedback, and so does her husband, who hears the same pages when he comes home from work. Now, as a family, the Novaks look back on those hard times when Brenda was just starting out and are grateful that something so good came out of it.

Brenda loves to hear from fellow romance enthusiasts.