"Charming Grace" by Deborah Smith

Deborah Smith is the author of one of my favorite books - "A Place to Call Home."  I have several of her other books and have enjoyed those, too.  This one follows the same formula as most of her other novels that I've read.  They usually take place in a small town in the northern Georgia mountains and are full of eccentric southern characters.  The heroine is a strong, beautiful, and vulnerable steel magnolia who's been that way since childhood.  The man she loves is usually the silent type with some kind of massive childhood trauma.  Their stories and subsequent travails on the way to happily ever after are the bulk of the narrative.  I know I just made her novels sound very formulaic, but they do seem to follow the same recipe.

Grace Bagshaw Vance has spent the last two years mourning her husband, who became a national hero on live TV when he killed a serial bomber before dying of gunshot wounds in the line of duty.  Now a Hollywood movie star, Stone Senterra, is intent on making his directorial and screenwriting debut with Harper Vance's story.  Unfortunately, he's a thickheaded action star, not a great writer or director.  Grace does everything she can to sabotage the movie when cast and crew arrive in her small hometown.  However, she's surprised to find herself attracted to Stone's bodyguard, Boone Noleene, a serious man with a painful past and a questionable future who understands why she won't cooperate on the film.

I liked this book but not nearly as much as the others that I've read by Smith.  Some of the literary tropes she used got on my nerves, but the book had plenty of humor and interesting characters to make up for them.  Unfortunately, there was an incident with the heroine near the end of the book that I found disgusting and in bad taste and seemed completely out of character for this author.  446 pages.