Circle on Home is the 5th Lost in a Boom Town book, but a good place to jump in. Some of the characters from the first four books appear, but are not integral to the plot.
This story has been in my head for over a decade. I think it was in 2002, we were driving through New Mexico on the way to the Grand Canyon. Fred pointed down a road and said, “I wonder what’s down there.” By the time we got to Arizona, I knew who was down there, a large animal vet struggling to make ends meet, with a drunk brother, a disabled sister and a father on his way home from prison after killing their mother. Initially I wrote Circle on Home with the father murdering the mother in a jealous rage, but I thought that was too dark for these books, so she died when the father was driving drunk. That’s a lot for Noah to forgive.
One of the reasons this book took so long to write was that I didn’t have the right heroine for him. I was pretty sure I wanted a girl from his past, someone who KNEW his past. And I wanted someone who thought she knew what she wanted, but it turned out that wasn’t what she wanted at all. So here comes Miranda, sister to town judgey-person Allison. The sisters still have some work to do on their relationship, but I have Allison’s story coming down the road.
It was good to go back to Evansville for this book, and to kind of touch on the bust that’s happening in the oilfields of Texas. Fred and I went down to the Shale this weekend and it’s sad to see the abandoned businesses that had grown up around the boom.
Check it out at these vendors.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/circle-on-home/id1069541106?mt=11
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/circle-on-home-mj-fredrick/1123485261?ean=2940157774219