Emma Madison, Master Meddler - McDermott Michener, Pat

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Résumé :
When she ran away in 1947, Jasmine Holmes was beautiful. Now she's back: sick, broke, divorced, her life in ruins-a perfect project for her aunt Emma Madison, master meddler. But small-town secrets live long in darkness, and the ones that Jasmine Holmes guards might be the darkest of all. How to fix Jasmine? True, her reputation as the town tramp was well deserved. When she fled tiny Medford for Las Vegas nine years ago, it was in a cloud of scandal. Once Emma rescues Jasmine from a hospital bed and her niece's eight-year-old daughter from foster care, townspeople are dismayed at their return. And when Jasmine, after she recovers, begins nursing the dying wife of her once-supposed lover, Medford erupts in a veritable volcano of gossip. Lovers from a decade ago appear, then a new suitor. Soon emotions of desire, jealousy, spite and fear roil the once-peaceful community. During her brief stay, Jasmine sets the lives of many on trajectories they never could have expected. And although her own journey may be long and arduous, love and joy wait at the end, thanks in large part to an elderly lady with the remarkable ability to take things gone wrong and set them to rights. Subtly influencing the course of events-watching, waiting, and then pulling the strings with perfect timing, is Jasmine's sage and savvy aunt-the redoubtable Emma Madison.

Biographie:
Pat McDermott Michener has been writing all her life: newspaper and magazine articles, speeches, video and presentation scripts, press releases, reports, web copy - but until Emma she had never written a novel. And she had absolutely no intention of doing so, until chunks of it assembled in her mind, and then, with greater and greater insistence, Emma and her niece Jasmine demanded that she sit down and tell their story. Mostly, Pat wanted to get away from the computer she had been tied to for practically all her working life. After her BA, BJ, she was a journalist, then transitioned to public relations and communications work before co-founding a Toronto-based corporate communications firm. Her company was in business for over 25 years before she left to pursue, in retirement, a variety of other interests long delayed. Old habits die hard, though. As a life-time reader, after a period of dissatisfaction with novels she had picked up, she decided to write one heavy on plot and light on flights of descriptive writing. How well she achieved it, you be the judge. Currently Pat has another novel underway, provisionally titled, The Willows Walk. Pat has three very accomplished, marvelous adult children, Carl, Greg and Julia. She lives in the countryside on a farm overlooking Georgian Bay, Ontario.