Meg and Don, a.k.a. the Dauntless Duncans, give up their high-powered legal life in Washington, D.C., when they inherit a houseboat in Key West. It’s all renewed romance and conch fritters until Meg saves a little girl from drowning—awakening a maternal longing she never expected to feel.

Nancy Weber’s diverse body of fiction includes The Playgroup, a psychological suspense novel with a medical twist; the slipstream novel Brokenhearted; the metafiction Ad Parnassum; the young adult mini-series Two Turtledoves; and eight romances written under her pseudonym, Jennifer Rose. Her nonfiction book The Life Swap, published in the seventies, recounts her experience exchanging lives—trading habits and jobs and even lovers—with a stranger. Weber has written for the stage as well, adapting the lyrics for the American version of composer Alexander Zhurbin’s Seagull: The Musical.

Weber earned a toque blanche at the French Culinary Institute and ran a catering business, Between Books She Cooks, for a decade. She plays chess, badly, and drinks Irish whiskey.