PR: A Case for Love by Kaye Dacus from Barbour Books

For Immediate Release from Barbour Books                                                                       
Friday, December 18, 2009                                                                                                          

A Lawyer Needs to Make A Case for Love in Conclusion to Dacus’ Brides of Bonneterre Series

Uhrichsville, OH— Return to Bonneterre, Louisiana, for the delightful conclusion to
the Brides of Bonneterre series by Kaye Dacus. Scheduled for release in February 2010, this contemporary novel finds a lawyer making A Case for Love when romance invades his well ordered life.

In A Case for Love, TV social-scene reporter Alaine Delacroix’s parents are about to lose their home and business to the giant corporation owned by the powerful Guidry family. When her only option comes down to asking the Guidry’s oldest son to help her fight for what’s right, can she bring herself to trust the handsome, disarmingly charming lawyer? And will Forbes Guidry be able to make a case for love before losing his job and family? Can both trust that God will present a solution before it’s too late?

Author Kaye Dacus enjoyed her visits to a local television station while researching this book. She likes to say she writes “inspirational romance with a sense of humor.” She lives in Nashville and graduated from Seton Hill University’s Master of Arts in Writing Popular Fiction program. She is an active member and former Vice President of American Christian Fiction Writers (ACFW).

A Case for Love by Kaye Dacus
February 2010. $10.97. 320 pages.
ISBN 978-1-60260-456-8


Author Q&A:

Q: Describe the fictional setting of Bonneterre, Louisiana, and how you came up with it for your Brides of Bonneterre series.

A: I started developing the city of Bonneterre, Louisiana, in 1992 when I was a student at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. As a laugh, I started writing a “where will we all be in five years” story for my best friend, featuring us and some of our closest friends from school. Well, what started as a lark started to grow—and grew into a 300,000-word behemoth (about the length of three full novels!). I needed to fictionalize it, though, so I renamed all of the characters along with the college and the city. And that’s how Bonneterre came into existence. Once the city existed, I had to populate it, and that’s when the Guidry family came to be. The rest, as they say, is history.

Q: In A Case for Love, Alaine Delacroix and Forbes Guidry are both “beautiful people”—the kind that are usually featured in romance novels and different characters than you normally write about. What do you hope your readers see in Alaine and Forbes that sets them apart from the other “beautiful people” one usually reads about in novels?

A: There’s such a stereotype of what romance characters should be: handsome or beautiful—like Hollywood movie stars—with fabulous homes, expensive cars and clothes, and dynamic careers. Forbes and Alaine both seem to meet all these criteria. . .on the outside, anyway. What I wanted to show is that even though people seem to have it all together on the outside, there’s no way to know the problems they may be having internally—whether with spiritual issues or job issues or family issues. The story starts out with both Forbes and Alaine more concerned about appearances—which is when we “see” more of them in the descriptions, but as the story progresses, both of them become much more concerned with what’s really more important—who people are inside and their relationships.

Q: Forbes is a self-proclaimed control freak, driving him to want to be involved in every aspect of his siblings’ lives. How did Forbes’s character develop, and what should readers take from his character?

A: When Forbes first came on the scene in Stand-In Groom, it was almost as a puppet-master—someone who could pull strings and make things happen that Anne and George couldn’t control. In Menu for Romance, he steps in and smoothes things out for Meredith with their parents—generating a solution non-confrontational Meredith never would have accomplished. He’s someone who finds it easy to pinpoint others’ problems and come up with solutions for them. But in A Case for Love, we learn that it’s much easier for him to control everyone else’s lives than his own. It’s so easy to see and solve his siblings’/cousins’ problems than to take stock of his own life and make the hard and painful choices and changes that God is pushing him to make. But until he realizes that he can’t control everything, that he must take stock of his own life and surrender control to God, he’s never going to be more than just the meddling older brother, and he’s never going to be truly happy.


Q: In Menu for Romance, Forbes counsels Major O’Hara to obey the command to honor his mother (by not keeping her or her condition a secret from Meredith any longer). In this book, however, Forbes seems to do just the opposite by taking a legal case against his parents and their corporation. How does Forbes situation with his parents differ from Major’s with his mother?

A: Honoring one’s parents is different than never disagreeing with them, never crossing them. We are commanded to honor them, but when they behave in a manner that is dishonorable, as Christians we are called to treat them as we would treat any other Christian who has sinned—we are to try to get them to understand what they’ve done wrong and repent and turn from it. By trying to get his parents to understand what they were doing was wrong and would be hurtful to others, Forbes was in fact honoring his parents—by reminding them of the high moral standards they taught him growing up.

Q: Both Alaine and Forbes refuse to do something their employers ask of them: Alaine refuses to give any information about the lawsuit once it becomes public, and Forbes refuses to give up the Mills case. What advice do you have for an individual struggling to stand up for a particular belief?

A: Choose your battle wisely. Do not compromise your morals and ethics just to keep a job, but don’t be belligerent or uncooperative to your employers over something that doesn’t matter in the long-run. Alaine refused to give her boss information about the lawsuit because to do so would have meant breaking a promise to her parents—and the reporter assigned to the story could find the information elsewhere. Alaine’s breaking her promise and telling them everything would have been expedient, but was not necessary. If it is a matter of principle, if it means choosing between right and wrong, always stand up for what is right, like Forbes did in not giving up the Mills case. Even though getting fired and finding another job may not be easy, it is better to abide by God’s law and do what is right than to live with the knowledge you’ve gone against His will by compromising your integrity.

Review of Stand-In Groom, Book #1 Brides of Bonneterre
Review of Menu for Romance, Book #2 Brides of Bonneterre
Review of Ransome's Honor, Book #1 The Ransome Trilogy  (A Historical by Kaye Dacus)