Barefoot Season

Michelle Sanderson joined the army to escape Blackberry Island and the mother who never wanted her. She comes back wounded in body and spirit, expecting to reclaim the inn she inherited and be left alone. Instead she finds Carly Williams running it — the best friend she has not spoken to in ten years, the one whose betrayal sent her away in the first place.

Carly is a single mother who has poured a decade into keeping the Blackberry Island Inn alive, and she has no intention of walking away from the only livelihood she and her daughter have. But the inn is deep in debt, the season is short, and neither woman can save it without the other.

Susan Mallery opens her Blackberry Island series with a story less about romance than about the wreckage two women can make of a friendship — and what it costs, over one Pacific Northwest summer, to forgive.