The Sea Keeper’s Daughters by Lisa Wingate
Whitney Monroe has moved from setting up high-end restaurants around the globe to settling closer to home, opening a couple of eating places in partnership with her cousin. It seemed like a winning situation at the outset, but she failed to do her homework. There are people who don’t appreciate the competition, and they are conspiring against her.
To complicate matters, Whitney receives a call from a stranger on North Carolina’s Outer Banks—specifically the town of Manteo on Roanoke Island. It’s the place she and her mother used to visit every summer when Whitney was a child, after her father’s untimely death, before her mother married Clyde, the jerk, and then died of cancer without telling Whitney how sick she was. The caller says Whitney’s stepfather needs care. Will she neglect her troubled restaurants to take care of a man who dislikes her as much as she does him?
When Whitney shows up at the rickety Excelsior Hotel, she is greeted by distrust. If she sells the hotel, she may be able to save her restaurants, but she will also destroy the dreams of local business owners, Mark Strahan in particular.
As she sorts through the mess left at the Excelsior, Whitney discovers family letters and treasures no one is aware of, and she is faced with an entirely new perspective of who she is and how her life has been influenced by the past.
Will Whitney learn to understand her mother’s unexplained decisions? Will she risk trusting Mark? Will she allow herself to trust the One who loves her more than life itself?
Lisa Wingate has once again created a gripping tale that connects the past and the present, fiction and fact. She bases her imaginative story on formerly unknown facts collected by the Federal Writers’ Project during the Great Depression. This fascinating premise is the foundation of a strong story of love and trust, of mistakes and misunderstandings, of selfless decisions and newfound faith.