Available Now: EsKape Press Box Sets!

I am so excited to announce a double release this week! Two of my books published by EsKape Press are included in book bundles that are available this coming Saturday, November 1! Christmas Wishes is part of Holiday Eskapes, which this magical cover:

And Searching for Lady Luck is part of Romancing the Rogue, which will sport this delicious looking cover:

Both of these bundles can be ordered from Amazon by clicking on the photos. To celebrate, I want to share a little bit about the locations featured in each of these books.

Christmas Wishes takes place in the fictional town of Zutphen, Michigan. I live in a suburb of Grand Rapids, but I’m on the southwest side, so the city of Holland is not far away. Between Grand Rapids and Holland are several small communities, and many of them are named for cities in the Netherlands, which is the ethnic group that settled this area many years ago. In this area you’ll see many names starting with the last four letters of the alphabet – something that puzzled my editors and beta readers! Many Dutch names begin with the prefix Van, which means “from.” Here’s a picture of the downtown area of a nearby city, which shows how I imagine Zutphen.

Searching for Lady Luck takes place in Wildwood, New Jersey. I spent a wonderful week there with my kids, when my brother and his wife invited us to a family home near the Jersey shore. Since it’s a tourist town, I imagined it must have suffered during the Great Depression. It’s difficult to find pictures from the era of my story, but this is what it looks like now:

When you read books, how important to you is the setting? Do you get a picture in your mind of the places the characters live? If you’re familiar with the setting the author chose, are you disappointed if their descriptions don’t match the way you know they should look?