In TASTE, readers meet Byronic hero, Master Sommelier Jason Frazier. He’s hot, single, and one of Wine Observer’s “40 under 40.” A legendary blind taster with uncanny talent, Jason sets his sights on TV stardom. He plans to build an empire and finally put to rest his family’s belief that he merely “drinks for a living” by winning the most elite, nationally televised wine competition in Vegas and getting a three-show network deal.
Jason is publicly set up with an A-list actress who could catapult him to the top of the Hollywood machine. For Jason, real romance is a hard pass––until he meets a lowly wine rep who is far from his type. Yet, for the first time, a woman challenges him. It’s inconvenient and irritating, but he can’t shake her.
Then, he loses his sense of taste.
Complicated family dynamics amp up when his wealthy father dies. Jason suddenly becomes his alcoholic mother’s conservator. She moves to LA to be near him, eroding his perfectly ordered life. Jason’s taste is not returning; his inheritance is at risk, his romantic life is in shambles, and he spirals down. Will he devise a way to win in Vegas without his superpower, receiving the success he’s set his sights on? Will he choose love over selling out to Hollywood?
TASTE is a fast-paced page-turner powered by an antagonistic protagonist readers will root for, complete with suspenseful romance similar to Joe Goldberg in Caroline Kepnes’s You, or Connor O’Toole in Teddy Wayne’s The Winner, with an arch of character reminiscent of Jennifer Weiner’s Sebastian in The Breakaway.
LA celebrity stylist Bryn Blanchard is navigating a shrunken post-menopausal libido, but she’s hungry to reignite the romance with her dashing, Hollywood director husband, Errol, and plans a sexy getaway. Except that a scheduled MRI for chronic headaches reveals a brain tumor, sending Bryn on an awfully different journey.
Six months to five years. That’s the prognosis for stage 4 metastatic malignant melanoma of the brain and lung––longer, if Bryn responds well to the treatment she must undergo for the rest of her life (however long that is).
Home from the hospital after brain surgery, Bryn senses Errol’s distance. The chemistry they once shared has flat-lined. She chalks it up to the stress of caring for a partner with cancer, but it feels like more than that.
With Errol disappearing into work, and her BFF, Aditi, shooting a TV series on location, Bryn finds herself solo at her first immunotherapy session. She’s floored when Errol invites her estranged brother, Mike, to play caregiver. But Mike’s not who Bryn thought he was.
At the Bel Air Cancer Clinic, Bryn meets Robin, a charismatic retired studio musician with the same diagnosis. Despite the unattractive side effects of cancer, Robin makes her feel beautiful and seen. His kind, spiritual philosophy prompts Bryn to question whether she’s been focusing on the wrong things. As her connection with Robin deepens, Errol remains MIA, her brother discloses a secret about his identity, and Aditi’s surprise visit further shakes up Bryn’s world. Will her marriage and friendship survive? Will Bryn?
Long Monday is a 91k-word commercial women’s fiction novel. Readers will explore a comedic view of friendship, illness and betrayal as in Katie Yee’s Maggie; or, a Man and a Woman Walk into a Bar, finding love in an unlikely place as in Perfect Distraction by Allison Ashley, and the life-affirming, heartbreaking, coming of (a new) age journey as in The Fault in Our Stars by John Green.
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