Mullet Run

She drove four hours to the end of the road to sell her grandmother's fish camp. She stayed to find out who she was.

At fifty-six, Ruthann Prine has spent twenty-two years being careful. She raised two children alone, taught school for twenty-nine years, and decided a long time ago that love was a young woman's game she had already lost. So when her grandmother Onie leaves her a falling-down mullet camp at the literal end of the road in Everglades City, Ruthie drives down to sign the papers and sell it to the first developer with a checkbook. She does not plan to fall in love with a town. She does not plan to fall in love at all.

But a hedge fund wants the whole riverfront for a gated marina, the fall mullet run is the only thing standing between forty fishing families and a hungry winter, and a quiet widowed crabber named Emmett Boone keeps showing up at dawn to fix a smokehouse that isn't his - a man who loves by doing and has forgotten how to want anything out loud. As the closing date bears down and a seventy-year-old secret surfaces from her grandmother's recipe box, Ruthie has to decide whether she came to the end of the road to give something up, or to finally, bravely, begin.

Mullet Run is a sweet, clean, slow-burn later-in-life romance: a warm Florida fishing village worth fighting for, a second chance at fifty-six, found family, and two stubborn hearts who learn it is never too late to be wanted out loud. No spice, and a guaranteed happily-ever-after. The first book of the Everglades City series.