I’ve written books with settings in the U.S., countries around the world, and even made up countries (like in the Royal Brides series). Forever Again in The Cordoba Agency series is the first book I’ve written with the Virgin Islands as a setting, and it’s long overdue.
Though I’ve lived most of my life in the United States, I have fond memories of growing up on the small island of St. Thomas, where you can stand on just about any elevated point and see nothing but beautiful blue water in the distance. I walked to school with my sister and our neighborhood friends, and walked home in the afternoons—navigating through the thousands of tourists who visited the islands on any given day while taxi drivers stood on the sidewalk yelling, “Back to the ship!”
During Carnival time, we perched on our usual spot across from the huge post office downtown and watched the troupes go by. At night we went to the Carnival “village” and ate our bellies full of food from vendors selling delicious plates of local cuisine. Then we danced off all that food to the sounds of soca and Calypso music.
At home we ate pate, dumb bread, sugar cake, curry chicken, stewed oxtails, and peas and rice (red beans and rice to everyone else). In our yard we had a papaya tree, mango tree, peas tree, fig tree (figs are what we call our small, sweet bananas), coconut tree, and my father had a garden at the back of the house where he grew herbs, sugar cane, and whatever else his green thumb could master.
We didn’t have much, but in retrospect, it was idyllic. I talk a lot about some of my favorite places in the world—Paris, Miami, Rome. But nothing beats the serenity and beauty of St. Thomas. Sometimes I get nostalgic and toy with the idea of moving back there at some point. Maybe I will. Who knows what the future will bring.
Until then, Forever Again is more than a romance between Hossam and Alissa as they catch the bad guys. It’s my love letter to the place where I was born and grew up. Like Dorothy said in “The Wizard of Oz,” there’s no place like home. For me, that place is the most beautiful island in the world—St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands.
