Dining with Joy-Rachel Hauck

Dining with Joy
Rachel Hauck
Thomas Nelson, Nov 16 2010, $14.99
ISBN: 9781595543394

In South Carolina, Joy Ballard is the host of the local cooking show, Dining With Joy that she inherited from her late father, a great chef. She has one problem in that she cannot cook. So when a national network wants to pick up her show she panics.

Former Manhattan chef Luke Davis moved to Beaufort, South Carolina after his restaurant failed. He pays his debts as a cook at the Frogmore Café.

Allison Wild of Wild Woman Productions who bought the rights to Dining With Joy, adds Luke to the show for wider appeal especially to the women. Luke and Joy detest one another at first sight, but the sparks make the show stratospherically successful. However, being an ethical person, Joy loathes concealing her inability to cook from their audience and especially from her co-host. As they fall in love, he knows her secret, but others want her job so are willing to expose her as a sham and further destroy his reputation as guilt by association.

With a nod to Christmas in Connecticut, readers will enjoy this entertaining contemporary romance starring an ethical woman struggling with her amoral behavior and a failed chef with the irony that she has succeeded and he has not. Readers will enjoy this amusing culinary romance in which No Reservations are necessary for Dining with Joy; just avoid her offerings and Eat your Heart out on his.

Harriet Klausner