Sugar & Spite

I can save anything with a balance sheet and ninety days. It was the one thing I'd ever been sure of - right up until the morning my own firm walked me out with my life in a too-small box and a younger, cheaper version of me in my chair by lunch.

So I did what any sensible, devastated, freshly unemployed strategist would do. I drove four hundred miles to lick my wounds at the beach, had one too many margaritas at a county auction, and - out of pure, incandescent spite for the smug developer bidding against me - bought a dead woman's bankrupt ice cream stand. Fourteen feet of leaning cone. A 1981 machine held together by habit and prayer. Roughly ninety thousand dollars of problems I absolutely had not come there to buy.

The plan was to fix it up and flip it by Labor Day. The island had other ideas. So did Pearl, the cantankerous legend who built the place and left me more unfinished business than recipes; the developer who wanted the lot flat and fought dirtier than anyone warned me; the barefoot surf-shop owner next door who kept being right at the worst possible moments; and the old life in Atlanta, dangling the exact corner office I'd spent twenty years earning - now that I'd finally found a reason not to want it.

Sugarberry runs on a hundred things that never show up on a spreadsheet. I learned every one of them the hard, funny, salt-and-sugar way.

Sugar & Spite is a humorous contemporary women's fiction with a strong reinvention arc, found family, female friendship, small-town/community setting, and a light slow-burn romantic subplot.