on the cover / By Heidi Walters

A Small-Town Affair

Carnelian Cove was a fiction, but she just knew there was something truly Humboldt about it!

(Nov. 12, 2009)  The environmentalists were at it again. Complaining that the waterfront project was going to ruin their town. That the environmental impact studies were flawed. That the whole process was corrupt. The project proponents just didn’t get it. Why wouldn’t people want such a nice development in their town?

And now they were getting scary — destroying equipment, nearly killing a guy on the construction crew, spreading rumors to the local media.

Terry McLaughlin’s Built to Last series.

GALLERY >

Or maybe it wasn’t environmental terrorism. Maybe it was that icky councilman behind the ugly deeds.

Wait a minute — is this Eureka we’re talking about?

Actually, no. It’s Carnelian Cove, the fictional town in Terry McLaughlin’s three-book Built to Last series, published by Harlequin under its Super Romance line. McLaughlin lives in Bayside, and she’s had seven Harlequin Super Romances published so far (she also recently lobbed another half dozen book proposals, not all to the same publisher). An eighth Super Romance, called A Small-Town Reunion — the third and last in the Carnelian Cove Built to Last series — comes out this December.

True to the romance genre (the best-selling fiction genre, by the way), the Built to Last books offer “life as it should be instead of life as it is” — a description McLaughlin has borrowed from romance author Jayne Ann Krentz. This is something devoted romance readers take for granted; they love that the guy gets the girl and vice versa, and that the dog never, ever dies. And that there is a happily ever after.

Is it a formula? Is it predictable? “Duh,” McLaughlin told a writing class a couple of months ago at the library in Eureka. “When I hear people call what I do formulaic, well, it makes me want to kick them in the shins. Of course it’s formulaic. Readers have expectations.”

However, readers don’t usually expect to recognize their own town in a Harlequin — but a Humboldt reader will have some decided a-ha moments in McLaughlin’s Built to Last books. No character, town or event is an exact match with anything in real life, said McLaughlin in an interview last week at Ramone’s in Old Town Eureka — which with its old brick walls and weird art and fair-trade lattes bears a suspicious resemblance to her fictional coffee house, “Mona’s.”

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 NEXT PAGE >SHARE