The Artisan Heart by Dean Mayes

Title: The Artisan Heart

Author: The Artisan Heart by Dean Mayes

Genre: Romantic Suspense

Opens:

High on the emergency-Department wall, a large digital clock flashed 6:00 p.m.".

Blurb:

Hayden Luschcombe is a brilliant paediatrician living in Adelaide with his wife Bernadette, an ambitious event planner. His life consists of soul-wrenching days at the hospital and tedious evenings attending the lavish parties organized by Bernadette.

When an act of betrayal coincides with a traumatic confrontation, Hayden flees Adelaide, his life in ruins. His destination is Walhalla, nestled in Australia’s southern mountains, where he finds his childhood home falling apart. With nothing to return to, he stays, and begins to pick up the pieces of his life by fixing up the house his parents left behind.

My thoughts:

The Artisan Heart is a page turning and, at times, very gritty story set against a background of reconnecting with your roots and making a new start. Hayden is a pushbike-riding paediatrician who is so good at what he does that his sometimes unorthodox methods are overlooked. Like all ER staff he works long hours and is dedicated to his work, his patients coming first. This does not sit too well with his ambitious wife, Bernadette. She is building up her PR business and expects to be a high-flyer very soon, she expects Hayden’s full support – tiredness and sick and/or dying children are not considered a reasonable excuse to miss supporting her events.

The story opens with two emergencies – Hayden’s emergency is a child who has been badly burned and Bernadette’s emergency, and just as important to her as Hayden’s patient is to him, is being asked to make a last minute presentation at a political business dinner. If it goes well she will win a major government contract and she will have made it into the big time. After an earth shattering series of event surrounding the burnt child, meaning he misses the event, Hayden gets home hoping for comfort and understanding. What he gets is the vision of Bernadette getting her comfort horizontally with her advisor.

Hayden is overwhelmed by the two traumatic events, has an emotional breakdown and runs. He runs to his old family property in the mountain community of Walhalla, he has not been back since the recent death of his father. Hayden is rock bottom and broken, he needs time to heal and think about his future. As Hayden grew up here, and knows most everybody, he is welcomed back into the small community as if he had never left. Then he meets Genevieve, certainly not a resident he has met before. And no, she is not the love interest, she is a child – a deaf child – who has been playing on the property and has a whole ‘family’ of toys living there. It is Genevieve’s mother, Isabelle, who he knows from his school days where she would bully Hayden mercilessly. Isabelle has also returned to heal from dramas in her life, and is starting up her own bakery in Walhalla.

Gradually Hayden and Isabelle start to get close, barriers breaking down, but before they can get their happy ever after two impediments arrive in town on the same day. What follows had me on the edge of my chair. Twists and turns, along with hand over mouth events unfold before all is revealed, and even once the immediate danger was over there were no guarantees the story would end the way I thought it should end.

I loved Hayden’s character the most, Isabelle didn’t come quite as alive for me as Hayden did – but each had their baggage that influenced the choices they made in the course of the story. Also the setting of Walhalla is a real – a place that I have been to, staying in one of the old cottages in the town. I have travelled the Walhalla Goldfields Railway through the most amazing scenery, and while I don’t remember there being a bakery, there was a café that sold cakes and pies that tasted fabulous – so as I read it I had these memory in my mind. This is the first book I have read by Dean Mayes and it won’t be the last.

Rating:

Excellent Stuff – a real page turner and hard to put down. I carved out extra reading time just so I could finish it. This book got carted into the bathroom with me, read over meals, read at work, and/or kept me up late at night. If this author has more work, I will certainly read it.

I wish to thank the author Dean Mayes for my copy to read and review