A Case for Love by Kaye Dacus

With this volume, Kaye Dacus completes her series The Brides of Bonneterre about three members of the large and prestigious Guidry family. In A Case for Love we follow lawyer Forbes Guidry, a partner in the most successful law firm in fictional Bonneterre, Louisiana.

Forbes Guidry is approaching 40 and is the oldest of seven siblings. He’s always felt responsible for them and it’s hard for him to allow them to make their own decisions and mistakes. In short, he has a controlling nature and as such I really struggled with this character through much of the novel. However, I believe the theme of the story is based on relinquishing control and learning to trust God, and, as such, understand that Kaye Dacus needed him to have this type of a personality. She did such a good job showing it that I had a hard time feeling sympathetic toward him until this facade began to break down.

Forbes has had a sort of crush on Alaine Delacroix, a TV anchorwoman with her own noon lifestyle program, for several years but it isn’t until they are seated together at the Bonneterre Bachelor/Bachelorette dinner that he meets her in person. And while he’s quite certain she is as interested in him by the end of that evening as he is in her, she brushes off his further attempts to contact her.

Alaine is a girl from a lower-income family that has pulled herself up and made her dream come true, but she discovers that her family home and neighborhood are threatened to be torn down to make way for an upscale subdivision and retail area. By whom? None other than the Guidry corporation. No wonder she refuses to see Forbes again. She seeks for a lawyer willing to take on a pro bono case to keep the powerful Guidry family from taking over, setting her up for a showdown with the man she is falling in love with.

Kaye Dacus succeeds in pulling the parts of this story together in the end, completing the series begun with Stand in Groom and continued in Menu for Romance. She is also the author of a historical pirate romance trilogy, The Ransome Trilogy, the third book of which is to release summer 2010.

Kaye also has a lot of unique essays on the writing craft at her website here. She is a lover of movies and a very visual researcher and writer, and shows her own methods of casting characters and storyboarding in PowerPoint. Well worth the hours it takes to browse through her archives.