1–What’s the name of your latest release?  Meet Me At Midnight 2–What is it about?  They have a love-hate relationship with summer. Sidney and Asher should have clicked. Two star swimmers forced to spend their summers on a lake together sounds like the perfect match. But it’s the same every year—in between cookouts and boat rides and family-imposed bonfires, Sidney and Asher spend the dog days of summer finding the ultimate ways to prank each other. And now, after their senior year, they’re determined to make it the most epic summer yet. But their plans are thrown in sudden jeopardy when their feud causes their families to be kicked out of their beloved lake houses. Once in their new accommodations, Sidney expects the prank war to continue as usual. But then she gets a note—Meet me at midnight. And Asher has a proposition for her: join forces for one last summer of epic pranks, against a shared enemy—the woman who kicked them out. Their truce should make things simpler, but six years of tormenting one another isn’t so easy to ignore. Kind of like the undeniable attraction growing between them. 3–What word best describes your heroine?  Sidney is a lot of things,…

Jen: What inspired you to write The Closer You Get? Mary: A friend told me about a single woman we knew who was having an affair with a married man. He left his wife and went to live with her, but the relationship didn’t last long and he went straight back to his wife. It made me wonder what would happen if both affair partners were married to other people and decided to be together; who would dare to take that first step towards their new life? How could you trust anyone enough to do that? If you were in that position and left your marriage and the other person didn’t leave, you would have burned all your bridges. So that became the start of the idea, that a married woman leaves home to be with a married man, but he doesn’t show up. What draws coworkers Ruby and Harry into having an extramarital affair? I think Ruby is a classic case of a woman who’s very unhappy at home and falls for the first person to show her some kindness and interest. On the other hand, Harry’s actually always been happy at home. His reasons for having an affair…

Welcome to Fresh Fiction, Alison! Please introduce yourself and tell us about your debut novel, YOU AND ME AND US. Thanks so much for having me! My name is Alison Hammer, and during the day, I’m a VP Creative Director at an advertising agency in Chicago, and during nights and weekends—I write upmarket women’s fiction. You and Me and Us the story of a workaholic woman and her distant teenage daughter, and it’s about the way their relationship evolves as they go through a tough summer, losing the third member of their family. It’s a tearjerker, but there are parts that will make you laugh and smile, too! What had your publishing journey to your debut novel been like? What has surprised you about getting to the publication of your first book? While You and Me and Us is my debut novel, it isn’t the first book I wrote. I have a manuscript that I put in a drawer after trying to find an agent for about a year. While I was querying, I wrote and revised You and Me and Us. It took about seven months of querying to sign with my amazing agent Joanna—who happened to be the…