REVIEW: The Long Way Home by Mariah Stewart

The Long Way Home by Mariah Stewart is a small town romance full of charming characters who you will easily fall in love with!

Ellis Chapman is living a life of luxury. She has a high paying job working for her father’s investment firm and she is engaged to a man that she adores. Everything in her life seems perfect until she finds out that her father and her fiancé have been stealing money from their clients. Ellis now finds herself jobless, homeless and without transportation. With nowhere else to go she moves to St. Dennis, Maryland where she has inherited a house from her mother. She changes her name to Ellie Ryder, hoping that no one will recognize her from the news and associate her with her father.

According to the terms of her mother’s will, Ellie must live in the house for at least six months in order to be able to sell it, so she sets out to make needed repairs to the home with the hopes of selling it after the requisite time period. As Ellie settles into her new home she ends up making new friends along the way and she has her sights set on one male friend in particular. She’s not really looking for romance, but when Cameron (Cam) O’Connor helps her to update her home, she can’t help but fall for him.

Cam has a special place in his heart for Ellie’s house and he has been looking after it while it sat empty for years. Cam also has a few secrets of his own along with painful memories from his childhood. He is very attracted to Ellie, but he is afraid to let anyone get too close to him. As he and Ellie work on the house together their relationship grows closer and they eventually trust one another enough to share their secrets. Both Cam and Ellie are unsure if they should take their relationship to the next level and with Ellie planning to move in six months time, it seems doubtful. Cam will have to work hard to convince Ellie that St. Dennis is right where she belongs.

Mariah Stewart has written a superb story that I was unable to put down. Her characters are realistic and easy to relate to. The romance takes place a little bit at a time so the reader stays satisfied throughout the course of the book. This is book number six in the Chesapeake Diaries Series and I am looking forward to book number seven to find out what will happen next in the quaint town of St. Dennis.

Book Info

Publisher: Ballantine Books (January 29, 2013)

As the only child of a wealthy investment manager, Ellie Chapman has never known anything besides a life of perfect privilege. But her years of good fortune come to an abrupt end when her father is exposed for swindling billions of dollars from innocent investors in a massive Ponzi scheme. And just like that, Ellie loses everything: money, job, home—even her fiancé, who’s jailed as her father’s partner in crime. With no job prospects on the horizon, no cash, and her family name in tatters, Ellie has only one place to go.

Sleepy St. Dennis, Maryland, is hardly where Ellie intends to stay, however. Keeping her identity a secret, she plans to sell the house her late mother left her in the small town and use the proceeds to move on with her life. Unfortunately, her ticket to a new beginning is in dire need of a laundry list of pricey improvements, many of which she’ll have to do herself. And until the house on Bay View Road is fit to be sold, the sole place Ellie will be traveling is the hardware store. But as the many charms of St. Dennis—not to mention Cameron O’Connor, the handsome local contractor who has secrets of his own—begin to work their magic, what begins as a lesson in do-it-yourself renovations might just end up as Ellie’s very own rejuvenation.