on the cover / By Heidi Walters

A Small-Town Affair

One day (in Book One), a handsome fellow from the city — San Francisco — comes snooping around Carnelian Cove’s two sand and gravel operations. Turns out he’s from a big conglomerate that snaps up family owned gravel businesses around the region, putting the small guys out of business in its indifferent pursuit of building a money monster. And he comes around to your gravel operation.

You’re Charlie, a fetching young heiress to a family gravel operation. What do you do? You dig your boot heels in like a stubborn mule and thwart him at every turn. Of course, he falls in love with your dirt-smudged face and decides to chuck that impersonal job in the city and move to the country. To Carnelian Cove. To be with you. Easy as pie.

For fun, let’s say you’re Mr. Big Evil who’s trying to woo the local yokels into selling you their family treasure businesses. How do you go about it?

Have a Southern accent and smooth talk ’em? Nice try, but it doesn’t work. So then you, Jack, take her — the ornery tomboy Charlie — to the “finest place in town” for dinner, the Avalon. It’s not what you’re thinking. Avalon is a shipping merchant’s mansion that’s been turned into a private club (and you’ve got connections). You, Jack, later take another local gravel operator — Earl, who wants to retire and is eager to sell his business to anybody — ocean fishing. Man to man, that’s the ticket!

Doesn’t work. Look, in Carnelian Cove the Outsider never wins. Unless he changes his direction (see previous scenario).

OK, but before you realize the game is up, how do you propose to transport your gravel south to the city if there’s no functioning railroad?

No problem. There are no choo-choo pushers in Carnelian Cove, although there’s brief mention of an “abandoned railroad spur.” But you can haul it out by ship or something. Or just not take it south to the city.

What if you’ve had a momentary setback and you just need to unwind?

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