Release day: Mackenzie Crossing

Today is the official release of Mackenzie Crossing by Kaye Dobbie (trade paperback and ebook, Harlequin). Here’s the blurb:

A passion for photography draws two stories together across time to Mackenzie Crossing.

Neville ‘Pom’ Darling, is on the hunt for the perfect photograph.

Skye Stewart, is searching for her long lost grandfather.

It’s 1939, and Neville, escaping an unhappy marriage and his memories of the Great War, finds himself in Mackenzie Crossing on the day of the terrible Black Friday bushfires. He meets the beautiful Georgie Mackenzie and in an instant knows that she is the subject he has been looking for. As the heat intensifies, Georgie and Pom begin to wonder if they have a future together; but first, they must survive the blaze.

Almost sixty years later, Skye Stewart returns to the area in search of her grandfather. Did he survive the Black Friday bushfires? Who is the exotic woman in the photograph she found? But when she arrives in Elysian, the closest town to where Mackenzie Crossing used to be, she finds more of her hidden past than she bargained for. A more recent past which she would prefer stayed forgotten…

Kaye dropped by today to tell us a little about this book:

One of the ideas for Mackenzie Crossing (there were several) came to me after reading a book on a photographer back in the late 1800s. This was a true story, about a woman who dragged her heavy camera behind her in a trolley as she travelled throughout the rugged Highlands of Scotland. She photographed people who were in very isolated places, capturing a way of life that was quickly vanishing. I began thinking about that woman and her quest, and how I could transfer the idea to Australia, in particular the Victorian High Country. I had already decided I wanted part of the story to be set in 1939 and told through the eyes of Neville ‘Pom’ Darling, an ex-soldier. Then I decided that Neville should be on a quest to capture that changing way of life, and to find the perfect photograph. Of course cameras had changed by then, and he didn’t need a trolley. His Leica 1 (Model A) fitted neatly into his swag. It is the photography theme that binds together a granddaughter and her long-lost grandfather, and because of it Skye sets out to find Neville, and so the story begins.

You can find out more about this book at Kaye’s website or buy it from Harlequin.