Betty Sue’s Homecoming: And Her Rocky Path to Respectability

Veteran journalist Durham Caldwell has written another steamy novel. This one centers on small town life. Warming himself at a Good Samaritan's fireplace after his car breaks down on a frigid winter night, New Yorker Colby Patterson spots the picture of an attractive young woman on the fireplace mantel. He learns she has "died of a broken heart" after her three-year-old daughter disappears. Weeks later, a young woman with facial features identical to those of the woman in the photo sits down opposite Colby in a crowded Manhattan lunchroom. He concludes she has to be the dead woman's missing daughter. He reunites her with her father, who has kept the porch light on every night for 27 years in the expectation that someday his daughter will come home. She is living a lifestyle she knows can bring shame to her newly rediscovered family, but which she is reluctant to give up because of the financial independence and the pleasure it brings her. "Betty Sue's Homecoming" is the intriguing story of her long, tense, and sometimes humorous struggle to overcome her demons and to adapt to small town Connecticut family life.

Durham Caldwell is a retired journalist who was a radio and television news director in Springfield, MA, for 30 years, a weekly newspaper editor and columnist for 22 more. He’s dealt with all kinds of people, many of whom turn up in his novels, ＂Tumultuous Affairs＂ (2009) and the new one, ＂Betty Sue’s Homecoming＂ (2012). And he’s worked some intriguing real life situations into his plots.