The nonprofit Pat Conroy Literary Center will host an evening of conversation with visiting novelists Colleen Coble, author of Fragile Designs, and Rhonda McKnight, author The Thing About Home, on Wednesday, January 3, at 5:00 p.m., at the Conroy Center (601 Bladen St., Beaufort). Books will be available for sale and signing in collaboration with the Beaufort Bookstore. Please call to reserve your seat in advance: 843-379-7025.
About Colleen Coble and Fragile Designs
Colleen Coble is the author of more than seventy-five books and is best known for her coastal romantic suspense novels. Her books have been honored with awards ranging from the Best Books of Indiana, the ACFW Carol Award, the Romance Writers of America RITA, the Holt Medallion, the Daphne du Maurier, National Readers’ Choice, and the Booksellers Best. She has over 5 million books in print and has been on the bestseller lists of USA Today, ECPA, CBA, Publishers Weekly, and Amazon. She lives and writes in Indiana.
Colleen’s newest novel, Fragile Designs, is set in Beaufort. Since her police-officer husband Eric’s mysterious murder, Carly Harris has been struggling to support herself and their infant son. Her career as an antique dealer isn’t sustainable, nor is her dream of becoming a novelist. So when her grandmother proposes she and her two sisters restore the family’s large Beaufort home and turn it into a bed-and-breakfast, she immediately gets to work clearing out the house. In the process, she uncovers a family secret that Eric kept hidden. And an heirloom that the wrongperson wouldn’t hesitate to kill for.
Carly turns to homicide detective Lucas Bennett for help. Soon, they’re entangled in a mystery with threads that lead all the way to the Russian mafia. Lucas has gotten in deep, and while he trusts his ability to keep Carly and her family safe, he begins to realize he’s vulnerable to an unexpected kind of danger. As they continue working closely together, Carly and Lucas realize they may have found something more precious than gold.
About Rhonda McKnight and The Thing About Home
Winner of the 2015 Emma Award for Inspirational Romance of the Year, Rhonda McKnight is the author of An 
Inconvenient Friend and What Kind of Fool. Themes of faith, forgiveness, and hope are central to her stories. Originally from a small coastal town in New Jersey, Rhonda now lives and writes in the South Carolina lowcountry.
In The Thing About Home, Casey Black needs an escape. When her picture-perfect vow renewal ceremony ends in her being left at the altar, the former model turned social media influencer has new fame—the kind she never wanted. With her personal and business lives in shambles, Casey runs from New York City to South Carolina’s Lowcountry hoping to find long-lost family.
What Casey doesn’t expect is a postcard-worthy property on a three-hundred-acre farm, history, culture, and a love of sweet tea. She also meets Nigel, the farm manager whose friendship has become everything she’s never had. Through the pages of her great-grandmother’s journals, Casey discovers her roots run deeper than the Lowcountry soil. She learns that she has people, ahome, a legacy to uphold, and a great new love story—if only she is brave enough to leave her old life behind.
Learn more about the nonprofit Pat Conroy Literary Center at www.patconroyliterarycenter.org.
