Sam's Letters to Jennifer

Jennifer, a Chicago Tribune columnist, is still mourning her husband Danny, who drowned while they were on holiday in Hawaii. Then word comes that her grandmother Sam has taken a bad fall and is in a coma. Jennifer goes to her at once — and at Sam's lakeside house she finds a packet of letters addressed to her, written in her grandmother's hand.

The letters are a confession. Sam has secrets she wants her granddaughter to know: that she never loved Charles, the husband of many decades who was Jennifer's grandfather, and that soon after that marriage she found real love with a local man known as Doc — a long affair that carried her through an unhappy marriage in an era when divorce was not an option.

As Jennifer reads, her own life begins to move again. She reconnects with Brendan, a childhood friend, and finds she is able to love a second time — though what she learns about him brings its own grief. Sam's Letters to Jennifer is one of James Patterson's standalone love stories rather than a thriller.