After working eight years for the New Zealand Forest Service as a clerk, she decided she could spend at least that much time trying to get a novel published.
Luckily it took five years, not eight, before Fiona wrote her first award-winning novel.
She has won the Australian Romantic Book of the Year award (category section) twice, one of her novels was listed by Romantic Times as one of their all-time top two hundred favorite romance books and she has been featured in Next and She magazines.
Fiona lives in a subtropical South Seas paradise called the Bay of Islands with her two sons.
I wish it had been a longer book. 250 pages just doesn't seem enough to flesh out characters and give you a good storyline too. Overall, I'd rate it a solid 3 stars. I'm enjoying the New Zealand setting and the different terms for things like "lounge" for living room, etc.
This is my second favorite book by Fiona Brand. I enjoyed the relationship between the characters, and I enjoyed revisiting characters from her past books.
Marrying McCabe is a category romance and the fourth installment in Fiona Brand's SAS/Lombard series (2001). I've read the first three books in this series and loved them. This is the story about the sister, Roma Lombard and Ben McCabe one of her brother's SAS friends. Someone tried to kill Roma and her brother Gray hires Ben as her bodyguard.
This was one STEAMY book! The suspense was really well done and I enjoyed that part of it. McCabe and Roma fall in lust with each other immediately and then after that it's lust to love pretty quickly. There's a lack of communication between the two that's not quite resolved by the end.
But what disturbed me about this book (and I understand this is my personal point of view) was the way condoms were addressed. Roma seems to have a problem with them... a BIG problem - she thinks of them as "dehumanizing." This condom theme is carried through for a while and truthfully I couldn't put it aside. Condoms weren't portrayed as being the "responsible" thing to do, but as kind of a dehumanizing, icky barrier used as a wall between a man and a woman. Her thoughts on this subject pulled me out of key scenes more than once.