Spotlight & Giveaway: A Study in Sparkling by Jodi McAlister

Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author Jodi McAlister to HJ!

Hi Jodi and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, A Study in Sparkling!

 
Hi – delighted to be here!
 

Please summarize the book for the readers here:

Fiona Fisher feels a lot of things after her husband leaves her for his secret second family: she’s hurt, she’s betrayed, she’s embarrassed – and she’s not sure she’ll ever be able to trust a man ever again.

But if she was ever going to… Satoshi Tsukamoto – the very sweet, very kind, very hot younger man who owns her favourite wine bar, who offers to help her put herself back together in a very, ahem, particular way – might be the one.

Satoshi has been in love with Fiona for years – since before her husband left – but he knows he can’t move too fast, or he’ll scare her away. What’s he meant to do, though, with all these feelings? when the woman he loves feels both within his grasp and somehow further away than ever?

This is a friends (with benefits) to lovers story about two fundamentally kind people who still don’t get it right all the time. It’s about healing after something going through something profoundly damaging and humiliating – and it’s also about some very, very fine wine.
 

Please share your favorite line(s) or quote from this book:

“I fell in love with Fiona Fisher-Sinclair at about 7pm on a Tuesday. It was inconvenient for several reasons, like it happening while I was short-staffed during a busy service, and her being married with three children.”

Please share a few Fun facts about this book…

I went to wine school to research this book! I dedicated more than a few weekends of my life to working through three levels of the Wine and Spirit Education Trust qualifications – I passed my Level 3 theory and tasting exams at about the same time as I finished the final copyedit. Wine is an important language for Satoshi in this book – pairing the right drink to the right person is one of the ways he shows his love – and learning how to speak it was so useful for unlocking his character…

…and also getting to taste a bunch of good wine every Sunday didn’t hurt.

What first attracts your Hero to the Heroine and vice versa?

Satoshi has always craved a proper home. As a child, he was dragged all around the world by his father, denied any real stability. Fiona represents the promise of that – and she also takes him seriously, in a way that he feels like few people (especially his older brother) ever do.

The dramatic end of Fiona’s marriage left her with a lot of different traumas, but chief among them is embarrassment: she hates being known as The Woman Whose Husband Left Her For His Secret Second Family. Satoshi, though, has always reliably made her feel like a person – like Fiona, not just a wife, not just a mother – and post-divorce, she needs that anchor more than she can ever really articulate.

Did any scene have you blushing, crying or laughing while writing it? And Why?

There are a couple, but I really did make myself blush writing the first sexual encounter between Fiona and Satoshi. She’s simultaneously so terrified and so needy, and he strikes just the right combination of gentleness and authority to put her at ease. Getting that balance right was tough, but I knew I had it when I was blushing at my own work.

A snippet…

“Come here.” Satoshi extended a hand to me.

I had to work hard to unclench my fingers. “I’m sorry.”

“What are you sorry for?”

“My hands. They’re all clammy—oh.”

He’d grabbed me by the waist, picking me up and sitting me on the edge of the desk in one swift movement. My knees fell apart and he stepped between them, body not quite touching mine but so close I could feel the warmth of him, radiating outward.

I swallowed. “Are you sure? You—we—don’t have to.”

One of Satoshi’s hands came up to frame the side of my face. “I know.” His thumb stroked along my cheekbone. “I want to.”

“Why, though?” His fingertips were nestling into my hair, drawing soft little circles, and the feeling was mesmerizing. “Why would you…?”

He paused. The tip of his tongue was pink as he licked his lips, and time seemed to slow down, stretching, expanding.

“Because I like you,” he said at last.

He leaned in closer, his forehead coming to rest against mine, and I barely repressed the shiver that ran through me as his glasses pressed lightly into my eyebrows. “I’m going to kiss you now, okay?”

Readers should read this book….

…if you like stories about women who have been wronged getting the love they actually deserve!

More seriously, though, this is a book about embarrassment. This is a feeling we’ve all experienced at one time or another – what’s more human than being absolutely mortified? If you want a book about someone managing to work through their embarrassment and find love, peace, and healing, this is for you.

What are you currently working on? What other releases do you have in the works?

I’m working on the third book in the Love Notes series at the moment, the follow-up to An Academic Affair and A Study in Sparkling. It’ll be out sometime next year, and it’s about someone’s sister and someone’s brother…
 

Thanks for blogging at HJ!

Giveaway:  A copy of A STUDY IN SPARKLING by Jodi McAlister

To enter Giveaway, please share this post on your Socials and Leave a comment below to this Q: For Satoshi, matching people with drinks – alcoholic or otherwise – is a love language. If someone was going to show their love for you by giving you a drink, what would it be?

🎉 Giveaway Rules 🎉
✨ Must be 18 years or older to enter.
✨ MUST leave a comment answering the giveaway question.
✨ Bonus Entry:Share this post on your social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) 
and drop a comment below letting me know you've shared it.
✨ Winner(s) will be selected at random.
✨ No purchase necessary—just enter and cross your fingers!
✨ If you win, I'll need your full name and mailing address to send your prize. 
This information will be shared with the author, publisher, or publicist solely for prize fulfillment purposes.
✨ Giveaway closes 3 days from the date this post is published.  
 

Excerpt from A Study in Sparkling:

From Chapter 2

I started opening the wines she’d put in the sleeves, eyes cast up to the ceiling so I didn’t get any hints from the foils or the corks, while Fiona scrabbled around in my desk. “Okay,” she said, “here we are—oh my God, Satoshi.”

“What?”

She gestured. “How can you do that so fast? Without looking?”

“It’s just practice.” I discarded the sixth cork and put my wine knife back in my pocket. “And maybe a dash of genetics. Strong fingers.” I waggled them at her.

“That must make you popular.”

It took me a moment to process what she’d said, by which time she’d covered her mouth with her hands. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry!”

She was so mortified I couldn’t help but laugh, despite the flood of extremely vivid images rushing through my brain. “Come on, Fiona,” I said, starting to pour tasting measures from the open bottles into the glasses. “We’ve talked about sex before. You can’t scandalize me that easily.”

“That doesn’t mean you want to be sexually harassed by a woman old enough to be your mother!”

“You’re only eight years older than me. If you think you’re old enough to be my mother, there might be some significant gaps in your sex education.”

She buried her face in her hands and groaned.

“Tsukamoto-sensei can run through some basics for you, if you like,” I said, unable to stop even though this was an extremely dangerous conversation. “The human reproductive system—”

“Don’t you dare, Satoshi.” She looked at me from between her fingers, and there it was, that mischievous sparkle in her eye, the one that had gone so dim since Matt left. “Don’t you fucking dare.”

I wrinkled my nose at her. She wrinkled hers back.

Then she dropped her hands. “Anyway, I believe I’m supposed to be the one assessing your knowledge right now, young man, not the other way around,” she said, putting on a mock-businesslike tone. “Tell me what to do.”

I gestured for her to sit down in my desk chair, then took a seat across from her. “The way the MS tasting exam works is that you have twenty-five minutes to taste six wines blind and figure out what they are: the grape, where they’re from, the vintage, any quality markers,” I explained. “It’s like maths—you get points for showing your work, in the categories you can see there on the grid. So if you come to the wrong conclusion but you get things right along the way—”

“—then you still get some points.” Fiona was studying the deductive tasting grid, squinting slightly, and my fingers itched with the desire to reach over and smooth the furrow between her brows. “I get it. So I just mark down what you say, and then at the end we work out how many points you get?”

“Exactly. Think you can do it?”

“I can give it a try.” She reached into her handbag and took out her phone. “I’ll put a timer on. Are you ready?”

I wasn’t, really. My brain was stuck on her saying tell me what to do, busy producing images so graphic they could probably get me sent to some kind of horny jail.

“I’m ready.” I scooted my chair as close to the desk as possible. “Are you? Got enough wine? Twenty-five minutes is a long time.”

“I’m still working on the rascal.” Fiona raised her glass of arneis to me, an innocuous gesture that was somehow the sexiest thing anyone had ever done. “And if I run out, there are six open bottles for me to try.”

She grinned at me, eyes crinkling in the corners. “Now show me what you’ve got, Satoshi. Your time starts . . . now.”

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
 
 

Book Info:

The author of the “brilliant” (Library Journal) An Academic Affair proves that the best love stories start with a pop with this sizzling romance about a recently separated single mom who’s absolutely not looking for another relationship…only to fall for the younger owner of her favorite wine bar.

Fiona Fisher thought she had it all: a loving husband, three kids, and a life far away from the suffocating expectations of her family. But when her husband reveals that he’s leaving her for his secret second family, Fiona is left devastated and humiliated.

Satoshi Tsukamoto wants it all. He’s the owner of a popular wine bar, and he’s studying for the hardest test in the world: the Master Sommelier exam. There aren’t enough hours in the day for anything else—except maybe for Fiona, his favorite customer, and the woman he’s absolutely, catastrophically in love with.

On paper, Fiona and Satoshi make no sense. He’s eight years younger than her and has no time for romance. She’s a single mother and doesn’t know if she’ll ever be able to trust anyone again. But how can Fiona resist when Satoshi suggests they give into their mutual attraction and let off some steam? And how can Satoshi resist when the woman he adores is finally within his grasp—even if they’ve agreed to keep things casual?

The perfect read for fans of Jasmine Guillory and Abby Jimenez, A Study in Sparklingproves that Jodi McAlister truly is “a writer to watch” (Booklist).
Book Links: Amazon | B&N | iTunes | kobo | Google |
 
 

Meet the Author:

Jodi McAlister, PhD, is an author and academic from Kiama, Australia. As an author, she has written five romance novels for adults and four for young adults, including, most recently, An Academic Affair (2025) and A Study in Sparkling (2026).

Her academic work focuses on love, romance and popular fiction. It means that reading romance novels and watching The Bachelor is technically work for her. She is currently a Senior Lecturer in Writing, Literature and Culture at Deakin University in Melbourne, and she is the President of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance.
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