One White Rose

April 15, 2016

Three very different "brothers," who bonded as homeless New York street urchins, meet their matches in the rough and tumble Montana Territory of the 1880s (with a little help from the meddlesome "Mama Rose") in these three historical novellas that were first published by Pocket in 1997. The youngest Clayborne brother escorts a fiery Boston mail-order bride to her intended and falls in love in Pink Rose. A rancher helps deliver a widow's baby in White Rose and succumbs to the mother in this humorous story with a dangerous edge. A scholarly hero and a heroine with a secret star in the multicultural romance Red Rose. This engaging trio are spun off from Garwood's For the Roses (1995).

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 1997
Although each of these books focuses on a different love story and could theoretically be read independently, they are linked by the characters and a thread of mystery that runs throughout the series. Readers may find it more satisfying to read the books in sequence--and to read the original story, For the Roses (Pocket, 1995), before tackling the "Clayborne Brides" trilogy. Second in the trilogy, following One Pink Rose (Pocket, 1997), One White Rose concerns Douglas Clayborne, who comes to a rundown ranch to claim a horse he is buying and ends up playing midwife and then protector to the beleaguered widow of the man he has come to see. Well-maintatined sexual tension and some great one-liners mark this title. In One Red Rose, Adam, former runaway slave, family scholar, and oldest of the Clayborne brothers, meets his matrimonial match (with a bit of help from Mama Rose) in the beautiful--and stubborn--Genevieve Perry. A plot that is frightening and funny in turn deftly advances a series that concludes this December with the publication in hardcover of Come the Spring (see Prepub Alert, LJ p. 58). Garwood lives in the Kansas City, Kansas, area.