The Key Ingredient

by Susan Wiggs

HarperCollins

Literature and Fiction: Women's Fiction

June 14, 2016

Available in: e-Book

The Key Ingredient
by Susan Wiggs

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Susan
Wiggs comes a wonderful companion story to her unforgettable
novel Family Tree.

Every great love story has a beginning. Annie Rush’s
started at a food cart in a vibrant city park. Annie, then a
film student, came across a ruggedly handsome, charismatic
chef serving up gourmet street food to an ever-growing
clientele lining up for his creations. Together, Annie and
Martin Harlow conceived The Key Ingredient, a cooking show
featuring Martin as the star while Annie handles production.

As they travel to Annie’s Vermont hometown to film
their pilot episode, she realizes that she might want to
create more than television magic with Martin. But does he
feel the same way? The weather is miserable, their shoot is
a disaster, and the maple syrup just isn’t flowing.
While Annie tries to cling to her vision for their show, she
can’t help but wonder if she could be as unlucky in
work as she is in love. Is she always destined to stay
behind the scenes?

Just as some recipes only come together at the last minute
with the addition of a key ingredient, sometimes a single
moment can change everything—turning Annie’s
life into a cornucopia of good fortune, the feast of her dreams.

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Susan Wiggs' Bio

Using blunt scissors, pages from a Big Chief tablet, a borrowed stapler and a Number Two pencil, Susan Wiggs self-published her first novel at the age of eight. A Book About Some Bad Kids was based on the true-life adventures of Susan and her siblings, and the first printing of one copy was a complete sell-out.

Due to her brother's extreme reaction to that first prodigious effort, Susan went underground with her craft, entertaining her friends and offending her siblings with anonymously-written stories of virtuous sisters and the brothers who torment them. The first romance she ever read was Shanna by the incomparable Kathleen Woodiwiss, which she devoured while slumped behind a college vector analysis textbook. Armed with degrees from SFA and Harvard, and toting a crate of "keeper" books by Woodiwiss, Roberta Gellis, Laurie McBain, Rosemary Rodgers, Jennifer Blake, Bertrice Small and anything with the words "flaming" and "ecstasy" in the title, she became a math teacher, just to prove to the world that she did have a left brain.

Late one night, she finished the book she was reading and was confronted with a reader's worst nightmare--She was wide awake, and there wasn''t a thing in the house she wanted to read. Figuring this was the universe''s way of taking away her excuses, she picked up a Big Chief tablet and a Number Two pencil, and began writing her novel with the working title, A Book About Some Bad Adults. Actually, that was a bad book about some adults, but Susan persevered, learning her craft the way skydiving is learned--by taking a blind leap and hoping the chute will open.

Her first book was published (without the use of blunt scissors and a stapler) by Zebra in 1987, and since then she has been published by Avon, Tor, HarperCollins, Harlequin, Mira and Warner Books. Unable to completely abandon her beloved teaching profession, Susan is a frequent workshop leader and speaker at writers' conferences, including the Romance Writers of America conference, the PNWA and Maui Writers Conference. She won a RITA award in 1994, and her recent novel The Charm School was voted one of RWA's Favorite Books of the Year. She is the proud recipient of several RT awards, the Peninsula RWA's Blue Boa, the Holt Medallion and the Colorado Award of Excellence.

Susan enjoys many hobbies, including sitting in the hot tub while talking to her mother on the phone, kickboxing, cleaning the can opener, sculpting with butter and growing her hair. She lives on an island in the Pacific Northwest with her husband, Jay, her daughter, Elizabeth, and an Airedale that hasn't been groomed since 1994.