The Red Door Inn by Liz Johnson

 

Marie Carrington is broke and desperate.  She wants to escape her past and looks for sanctuary on Prince Edward Island.  She meets up with Jack Sloane and he hires her to help renovate the bed-and-breakfast he wants to open.   She has an eye for color and Jack see potential and a desire to help her.  She will be working with his nephews Seth.  Seth has moved over 3,000 miles away.  He wants to forget the fiancé who broke his heart.  Helping keep an eye on a woman who is skittish and has an eye for expensive antiques wasn't part of the deal. 

Marie and Seth both want to help get the bed-and-breakfast ready and opened in only two months.  It will take everything they have.  As they slowly learn to work together, they learn that life on the island may be better then they imagined.  Marie learns that everything she imagined about PEI that she read about is even better.

Liz Johnson did a remarkable job with the characters.  While we pretty much knew about Seth and his past right away, the secrets behind Marie were slow to come out throughout the whole books.  It made her character much more intriguing.  You had a desire to reach out and help her. 

I loved Jack and his desires not only to help Marie, but also to willful his dead wife's dream of opening the bed-and-breakfast.  As they encounter each roadblock along the way your heart breaks for him as his dreams seem to shatter.

I loved Aretha and Caden.  Both of them became such good friends to Marie and were able to help her in different ways.  I also like the friendship the developed between Aretha and Jack, and how she refused to help him much more when certain things started to happen (NOT going to spoil it!) and she didn't like how Jack handled it!

I do have to say that after reading this book, as a bookworm and a lover of cats, I found the perfect name for my next cat - Chapter!  Loved the cat's name in this book!

This book has been provided courtesy of Baker Publishing Group and Graf-Martin Communications, Inc.   I was not required to write a positive review.  The opinions I have expressed are entirely my own.