The author
About Hattie Larkin
I write about small coastal towns because I grew up near one, and because I have never got over how much a place like that knows about you before you have finished parking.
The Nightingale Inn books are set in Larkspur Cove, Maine: population 2,400, one harbor, one bakery with a chalkboard by the door, and a fourteen-room Victorian inn on the bluff that costs more to keep standing than it earns. I made the town up, but I made it up out of real parts — brass room keys, a ferry timetable nobody trusts in November, a boiler with documented opinions.
They are closed-door romances. Kisses on the page, everything else behind it. That is a craft decision rather than a squeamish one: if the door is going to close, the tension has to live somewhere else — in the banter, the near-misses, the hand on the small of the back. I would rather write the ninety seconds before than the scene after.
What you can expect from me: old inns, kitchens that are always busy, people who know far too much about their neighbours, men who are much better at fixing things than at discussing their feelings, at least one animal with a criminal record, and a happy ending every single time. That last one is not a spoiler. It is the contract.
“Fine. Good.” is hereby established as the official unit of praise. Exchange rate: one (1) Fine-Good equals one (1) sonnet.
This is the closest thing Graham Hartwell has to a love language, and roughly the level of emotional disclosure you can expect from the men in these books before chapter twenty.
Where to start
At the beginning, ideally. June arrives on the afternoon ferry with too much luggage and a job nobody told the innkeeper about.
Or check in to the guest list and hear when the next one is ready.