Tanya M Cooper

Waiting on Postcards Tanya M Cooper

Jilian Ford - a destitute young woman - after losing her fiancé in a terrible car accident, relocating to a small, coastal town and finding herself lacking a career, friends and any significant goal in life, desires to end her pain by committing suicide. She is about to throw herself off of a bridge, when fate intervenes and she stumbles across a discarded engagement ring and becomes obsessed with finding its owner and in doing so, uncovers a double murder (believed to be a murder-suicide) sixty years prior. On her journey to uncover what really happened to the young engaged couple, Jilian meets an array of people who are as mysterious as the cold case in which she finds herself entwined. None so influential however, as an 88 year old curmudgeon - Robert Sylvester - trapped in a retirement home, after a prolific career as an international photographer for National Geographic. As he begins to divulge what he knows about the deceased couple, he takes Jilian - whose only travel experience is through the multitude of postcards her father has been sending her - vicariously along on his many travelling adventures from Mount Everest to Thailand; to the island of Malta and across the flowing waters of South Africa. Jilian soon learns that it is the smallest of things - a ring or a chance encounter with a stranger - that often become the most significant and life altering; and while she is forced to make decisions about her life and to risk falling in love again, she soon realizes that the postcards she's been awaiting throughout her life, contain the greatest message of all.