Inspired by Cathy Lamb’s childhood, the amusing adventures of the Rossi and O’Brien families continue in Book Two of the Deauville Drive series.

1979. Deauville Drive, Huntington Beach, California. Ten kids, a singing mermaid, hundreds of pies, and a body in the kitchen.

Jesse O’Brien, twelve-years old, announces to her stricken mother, Annie, that the motionless man looks “pregnant” and may not be breathing as he lies corpse-still on the laminate floor. Annie clocked him with her favorite red pie pan which is now, sadly, cracked into tiny pieces.

Jesse knows that her mother will dearly miss the perfect pie pan, but the pregnant looking man, a sneaky friend of Annie’s weasel-face soon to be ex-husband deserved it, as he had angrily thundered through their screen door like a dump truck and Annie had protected them both.

Unfortunately, Annie is frazzled and upset. Clocking a man had not been on her day’s agenda! It had not been on her list of things to do!

Furthermore, there had been no sign of this upcoming calamity. Why, there were freshly baked apple and peach pies on the table, along with a Ball jar full of roses, with hummingbirds whizzing around and birds chirping on a fine blue afternoon.

With five kids, an upcoming divorce, a full-time job waitressing at Robby’s Big Boy, and a growing pie business, Jesse knew that her mother had enough on her plate. Falling in love with Vietnam veteran Tommy Rossi, who lives next door in a sprawling white house on an old orange orchard with his five kids offered up a sweet, if sometimes flustering, complication.

And now this! A body in their pretty yellow kitchen!

As Porky, the talking parrot, declares, “I want a beer!” and “I’m a cat!” Jesse and her close-knit family try to navigate a life that has been recently turned upside down and shaken.

The hilarious cast of Deauville Drive returns with quirky neighbors, a friendly stripper, and Liliana the singing mermaid, the one who brings peace and joy to all – unless she’s scaring the wits out of Annie’s almost-ex-husband with a high-pitched C note blast, right in his ears.

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