Loren McLeod

In the fifth book of the "A Sea of White Impatiens series, Christian Gallagher rents an RV and road trips it up the East Coast visiting family and old friends on his way to Massachusetts to open Superior Bodies Boston. With him are Drucilla, Herod, The Whore of Babylon and Linden Midwinter, who everyone thinks is his boyfriend. In ten days Christian learns more about Linden than in the two years he has known him. Never in a million years would Christian have thought his gun-toting, Larchmont Ladies Association-referencing employee enjoyed fantasy novels, had been a gymnast and loved to bowl, and never would he have thought Linden's family story could rival his. Never, too, would Christian, the most promiscuous man in Orlando and maybe the world, have considered giving it all up for one man. Find out if he does, and if the man he does it for is Linden.

It is 1990, and Wysteria, Florida, America's oldest and least credible spiritualist community, is celebrating its 100th birthday. Coordinating an anniversary festival is local resident and "US Arts & Crafts magazine publisher Sheila Renault. Assisting Sheila is her cousin Van, "US A&C's incompetent receptionist and Wysteria's reigning Virgin Queen; Erich Weimar, ex-con, divorced father and town hunk; his nephew Seth, a troubled 30-year-old in the body of an even more troubled adolescent; Justin Cook, whose parents bought the Wysteria Hotel so he could have some other place to lie around; Marilyn Smart, the community's most talented and most modest psychic; and Lenore LaShomb, its least talented and least modest. Together Sheila and her committee organize an event that makes Wysteria a household name--for very different reasons than they expect--and makes the upper-class residents of neighboring Talbot consider nuking it from orbit.

It's 1995 everywhere but Sandspur, Florida, where Sylvia Enman and her sister-in-law Elaine are running what will likely be the town's last Renaissance Festival. Others soon out of a job include Sylvia's much younger beau, Jeff Brenner; his father and the fair's occasional dark queen, Roger; brilliant and wasted Michael and Jacqueline Dempsey; and a trio of minstrels who would be rich men if they sold as much marijuana as they smoked. Collateral damage includes Sandspur's most well-known and loneliest resident, Julie Kitzmiller; Sean Keogh, its prettiest, and ugliest; and Elaine's adopted and terribly scarred son, John, who finds some real joy as his family loses its fair, and its livelihood. Everyone is forced to make career and life decisions, and everyone quits settling--even those who settle in Sandspur.