Press Reviews
October 10th, 2009 11:00am by Ben Steelman, Wilmington Star News I’m overdue acknowledging a shipment from Jacqueline DeGroot of Sunset Beach, who sent in not one, not two, but three of her most recent titles. This lady is the Terminator of romance writers — she just keeps coming. A few weeks ago in the Sunday paper, we noted DeGroot’s latest installment in her “Widows of Sea Trail” series: “Tessa of Crooked Gulley” (American Imaging, $18.95 paperback). This one’s about a dreamy, widowed breast-cancer survivor who books herself on a Caribbean cruise, has a torrid affair with the hunky harbor pilot, then comes home to solve the disappearance of her good friend Amy. (She suspects Amy’s nogoodnik husband.) Then Mr. Harbor Pilot shows up again. It’s worth noting that DeGroot — who signs herself “Jack” — as been a Sea Trails resident for the past decade or so. Also in the packet was “Running Up the Score,” a road adventure that DeGroot actually wrote last year with her friend Peggy Grich of Ocean Isle Beach (American Imaging, $16.95 paperback). Like Alexandre Dumas, DeGroot has so many ideas, she sometimes has to take on collaborators to get them all done. “Running Up the Score” continues a series of RV-related mystery/adventures. Their heroine — a Tar Heel who keeps changing her name to avoid a husband straight out of “Sleeping With the Enemy” — is on the West Coast. She sets out to help an Iraq veteran who’s trying to find his long-lost girlfriend and only has a snapshot to go on. Meanwhile, she has an on-again, off-again relationship with Brick, a federal agent who targets molesters. But can Brick come to the rescue in time when she’s stuck in Death Valley? A different turn for DeGroot is “Father Steve’s Dilemma” ($14.95 paperback), about a Catholic priest, doubting his vocation. Then, while teaching at a Catholic university, he discovers that one of his favorite students is really a girl — a girl in trouble. Can he help her and resist his all-too-human temptations? DeGroot’s previous books include “Climax,” “Secret of the Kindred Spirit,” “Barefoot Beaches” “Shipwrecked at Sunset” and (with Miller Pope) “Tales of the Silver Coast: A Secret History of Brunswick County.” (She writes that she and Pope are now working on a history of Sunset Beach.) You can find most of her books at Amazon.com or at her Web site, http://www.jacquelinedegroot.com. One has to admire this lady’s moxie at self-publishing. DeGroot also had some good news. Her daughter Kimberly has been successfully battling a series of tumors, had graduated from the University of North Carolina Wilmington and had a time touring Italy with sometime-Brunswick author Mark Gordon Smith (”Tuscan Echoes,” etc.”) She’ll be entering The Art Institute in New York in November. If I remember the story correctly, DeGroot began writing her romances in her van while waiting to pick up Kimberly from school. Tags Jacqueline DeGroot, Mark Gordon Smith, Miller Pope, Peggy Grich | Category Authors, Review |