It’s 8am Seattle time and best-selling author Susan Mallery is cradling a coffee at home, with her cat for company, as P.S zooms in to hear all about her latest novel, Almost Perfect.
A “heart-warming romance of second chances”, it launches just as couples count down the hours to Valentine’s Day. This tale will especially resonate not only with those who love but with those who have loved and lost, reminding them that hope is where the heart is.
Cue Liz Sutton, the girl from the wrong side of the tracks who grew up to become a mystery writer. Back then, she’d stolen the heart of the most popular boy in town, Ethan Hendrix. Their secret romance helped her through tough times – until he betrayed her.
Heartbroken and pregnant, she left their Californian town of Fools Gold forever – or so she thought. But now she’s back, and she has to face the man who has no idea his son exists. Even after all these years, Liz and Ethan can’t deny their desire for one another. Will they have a second chance at love?
Mallery – the daughter of an Emmy Award-winning TV lighting expert from Glasgow – has, in just over a decade, penned 23 books in the Fools Gold series, all of them published in her US homeland where they are a huge success.
Now Mills & Boon are bringing them to the UK with the first, Chasing Perfect, out last year. She tells P.S: “I started writing straight out of college where I majored in accounting. I sold my first book a couple of months after I graduated.
“I was very lucky. I had been writing for a while about families but Debbie Macomber (a leading author with 200 million books in print) was a mentor to me and told me families were limited. She said I should write about a town.”
And so Fools Gold was born. She smiles: “There are about 23 Fools Gold books so UK readers have a long way to go. They were such fun to write. Every time I started a new book it felt like coming home.”
And on the subject of home, Mallery reveals she is hoping to return to her Scottish roots.
“I would love to come to Scotland,” she says.
“We were planning to come to the UK this summer but we have family members and friends who are quite vulnerable so we cancelled. But we have a British Isles cruise on our bucket list.”
“My parents took me to Glasgow when I was 12. We visited two aunts. I was shy but when I did open my mouth it was, ‘Oh, you’re American, don’t talk,’” she laughs. “My late father was born in Glasgow and met my mother in Canada.
“He worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation then moved to Los Angeles and worked for ABC until he retired. He was a lighting director and won a technical Emmy – he did sports, and the Olympics. He was fun.”
She smiles, taking up her phone, tapping into its music and releasing a burst of Scotland The Brave on bagpipes.
Humour is clearly large in Mallery’s life and peppers her text. Her warm and humorous novels have sold 40 million copies worldwide and counting – almost perfect.
Susan Mallery – Almost Perfect, Mills & Boon, £8.99
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