The Road Home

April 26, 2010
In this gentle coming-of-middle-age tale, Ford (Last Summer) follows a gay Boston photographer recuperating at his father’s smalltown Vermont home, where he’s drawn into an eerie Civil War mystery. Following a car accident that shattered his leg, 40-year-old Burke Crenshaw is less than happy to find himself in his childhood bedroom (still sporting a Raiders of the Lost Ark movie poster) for six weeks, tended to by his father, Ed, and Ed’s girlfriend, Lucy. Resentful of his country convalescence and feeling restless, Burke finds relief in a photography project inspired by Lucy’s deceased husband’s book on Vermont’s Civil War militias. Fascinated by the love letter of soldier Amos Hague, Burke launches a quest to uncover the truth about the infantryman and his fiancé, with assistance from a witty smalltown librarian and the 20-year-old son of an old high school crush. Though Ford fails to follow through on a promising supernatural twist, he crafts an involving if low-key slice-of-life narrative about the importance of being true to one’s self.

September 18, 2017
In this enjoyable contemporary, Way (Her Australian Cattle Baron) combines romance with a decades-old mystery and the dazzling beauty of the Australian outback. Bruno McKendrick is a successful businessman who attends a party near Sydney Harbor and sees an extremely beautiful cellist, Isabelle Martin. She looks exactly like Helena Hartmann, a missing woman whom Bruno’s father Ross, a private investigator, was searching for years ago. When Bruno approaches the ethereal Isabelle, he is disappointed to learn that she is not related to the wealthy Hartmann family. After Bruno shows Isabelle pictures of Helena, she is startled by the incredible likeness and starts asking her parents about her birth. Her mother’s defensiveness and shockingly evil response are almost too sinister to be believable. The secrets behind Helena’s disappearance are slowly revealed as Bruno and Isabelle travel to the Hartmanns’ remote homestead seeking answers about her parentage. Somewhat predictably, Hartmann family members believe that Isabelle is pretending to be Helena in order to gain part of their wealth. The mystery behind Helena’s disappearance propels the novel forward at a swift pace as romantic tension heats up between Bruno and Isabelle, and readers will eagerly follow them to the satisfying ending.