Sweet Home Carolina

Ocean revisits her native South Carolina in a folksy second novel (Fool Me Once) that turns on a familiar theme: evil land developers threaten quaint down-home town with extinction. Narrator Jaxie Parker is an aggressive exec for a top Atlanta advertising firm who grudgingly accepts a pro bono assignment to pilot a revitalization project for her boss's boyhood hometown. The ""backwoods"" South Carolina coastal village of Rumton, a tiny community with a Medicare-age demographic and not much more, doesn't even boast a motel, so Jaxie is put up at the home of local old-timer, Pop. Though unimpressed at first (""Rumton was a dive""), a couple weeks of Pop's hospitality (and Southern cooking) persuade Jaxie to get mother hen protective once shifty-eyed out-of-towner Lester ""the Investor"" Smoak offers to buy options in an apparent land grab. Falling in love with ad agency colleague Justin, who also happens to be Pop's hunky nephew, also brightens her stay. United against the shady interloper, Ocean's handful of homespun heroes must figure out a way to save Rumton. Predictably, Jaxie sheds her slick city skin and learns the redemptive lesson ""that's it's the simple things that pull heartstrings.""