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Susan Wilson is an American author of general fiction, women’s fiction, and animal fiction.

She is best known for writing books such as One Good Dog (2010), which was a New York Times bestseller; The Dog Who Danced (2012), which was a recipient of the illustrious Maxwell Medal for Fiction awarded by the Dog Writer’s Association of America; and Beauty (1996), which was adapted into a CBS film starring Jamey Sheridan and Janine Turner.

A wife, mother, and grandmother, Susan currently lives on Martha’s Vineyard with her beloved husband, who is a retired school teacher, and their pet dog, Cora.

She also has a Quarter horse mare named Maggie Rose.

More about Susan Wilson

Genres: Animal Fiction, Fiction, General Fiction, Women's Fiction

Born: 1951

United States

Website: https://www.susanwilsonwrites.com/

Non Series

  • Beauty (1996)
  • Hawke's Cove (2000)
  • Cameo Lake (2001)
  • The Fortune Teller's Daughter (2002)
  • Summer Harbor (2003)
  • One Good Dog (2010)
  • The Dog Who Danced (2012)
  • A Man of His Own (2013)
  • The Dog Who Saved Me (2015)
  • Two Good Dogs (2017)
  • The Dog I Loved (2019)
  • What a Dog Knows (2021)

Omnibus Books

  1. One Good Dog / The Dog Who Danced (2017)

Detailed book overview

Non Series

Beauty

Every reader is familiar with the popular tale of Beauty and the Beast. But what if the fairy tale came true?

Beauty transposes the story of Beauty and the Beast to a modern key, tracing the developing love between artist Alix Miller and her reclusive, aristocratic client, Leland Crompton, a man disfigured by disease, as she discovers the magnificent man behind the disturbing exterior.

Beauty
Director: Jerry London
Cast: Janine Turner, Jamey Sheridan, Linden Ashby, Shirley Broderick, Malcolm Stewart, Kevin McNulty, Hal Holbrook, Lossen Chambers, Jenafor Ryane
Author: Susan Wilson
First Release: 1996
ISBN: 978-0684834221
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Hawke's Cove

The year is 1944. After the loss of her first child, Evangeline Worth returns to her beloved grandmothers farm in Hawke's Cove. Once the enchanting place of her youth, this small coastal town is now a sanctuary for her solitude. 

With her husband, John, across the Atlantic on the war front, Vangie does the best she can to put her life, and heart, back together. All of that changes one day when a man appears on her doorstep searching for work. Joe Green looks able enough, and though she wanders why he isn't in the service, Vangie takes him in on instinct.

As a rich friendship develops between them, the Army informs Vangie that John is MIA. At the same time, rumors in town circulate about a downed Hellcat plane and its missing pilot. Smoothing away each other's loneliness, Vangie and Joe fed their relationship deepening into a forbidden passion. Then John is suddenly found alive, and the lovers separate -- but cannot bear to sever their bond.

In 1993, Vangie's son Charlie lands a plum reporting assignment: to unlock the puzzle of the recently dredged-up Hellcat in Hawke's Cove. To investigate the fifty-year-old mystery, he heads to Hawke's Cove, where he meets respected local Joe Green and his daughter, Maggie. 

As a romantic relationship blossoms between Charlie and Maggie, Vangie and Joe realize that they must open up the past -- and the secrets they'd buried along with it. A mesmerizing tale of joy and sorrow, misbegotten dreams and desires, Hawke's Cove is peopled with characters who are at once mysterious and unabashedly revealing.

Author: Susan Wilson
First Release: 2000
ISBN: 978-0671035747
Publisher: Pocket Books
Cameo Lake

Putting herself first doesn't come easy to Cleo Grayson McCarthy. A loving wife, doting mother, and dutiful daughter-in-law, she has always done her writing on the side, in hours stolen from her "real" life. Now, desperate for the solitude she needs to finish her latest novel, she convinces her husband that she must spend the summer at her best fiend's rustic cottage at Cameo Lake in New Hampshire, out of reach of cell phones and the demands of family and friends.

Even as she immerses herself in her work, Cleo can't help but be aware of the man who lives across the lake. A reclusive composer, Ben Turner is struggling to come to terms with his wife's accident. An outcast, he is regarded with suspicion by the lake community, even accused by some of harming his wife. But at night, Cleo hears his music drifting across the water, and senses she has found a kindred spirit.

As they meet time and again -- often on the raft anchored in the middle of Cameo Lake -- Cleo and Ben begin a satisfying friendship surprising in its intimacy and depth. And when a painful betrayal leaves Cleo stunned and adrift, she finds unexpected comfort and absolution in Ben's arms.

But love is never simple, and before Cleo can determine whether to fight for her marriage or seek a future with Ben, she must first know her own heart, and admit truths ling left unsaid. Even as Cleo struggles to come to terms with her own truths, Ben must find a way to face his.

Author: Susan Wilson
First Release: 2001
ISBN: 978-1416587729
Publisher: Gallery Books
The Fortune Teller's Daughter

After years of moving around with her footloose mother, fortune teller Madame Ruby, Sabine Heartwood settles in the quiet town of Moose River Junction. But when Danforth Smith returns to his hometown, reluctantly putting his career on hold to deal with family affairs, Sabine faces the dilemma of falling in love with a man anxious to leave the only place she has ever called home. 

Things get more complicated when Ruby appears, finally ready to answer her daughter's lifelong questions about their mysterious past. Then Sabine "sees" a tragic event that occurred in Dan's family more than three hundred years ago, which is linked to a painful secret from which he's been unable to break free. Now, she must face the gift of "seeing" she's inherited but rejected -- for only then can she learn the truth.

Author: Susan Wilson
First Release: 2002
ISBN: 978-0743442312
Publisher: Pocket Books
Summer Harbor

It was a beautiful New England beach town in which dreams were made, and love, like the tide, would fall and rise again....

Kiley Harris hasn't been to her family's summer home at Hawke's Cove for nearly twenty years. As a child, she couldn't wait to be reunited with her two best beach-house friends, Grainger Egan and Mack MacKenzie. Kiley and the boys were an unshakable trio -- sailing and swimming every day, playing cards on the porch at dusk, and sharing their dreams. But everything changed the summer before they left for college, when the boys' friendship turned to rivalry over Kiley -- with tragic results. 

Since then Kiley has been in self-imposed exile from the place she once loved so much. But now that her parents are ready to sell the property, Kiley feels compelled to return to Hawke's Cove with her teenage son Will and come face to face with the past...and with the man who may be Will's father.

Author: Susan Wilson
First Release: 2003
ISBN: 978-0743442336
Publisher: Pocket Books
One Good Dog

Adam March is a self-made "Master of the Universe." He has it all: the beautiful wife, the high-powered job, the glittering circle of friends. But there is a price to be paid for all these trappings, and the pressure is mounting—until the day Adam makes a fatal mistake. His assistant leaves him a message with three words: your sister called. 

What no one knows is that Adam's sister has been missing for decades. That she represents the excruciatingly painful past he has left behind. And that her absence has secretly tormented him all these years. When his assistant brushes off his request for an explanation in favor of her more pressing personal call, Adam loses it. And all hell breaks loose.

Adam is escorted from the building. He loses his job. He loses his wife. He loses the life he's worked so hard to achieve. He doesn't believe it is possible to sink any lower when he is assigned to work in a soup kitchen as a form of community service. But unbeknownst to Adam, this is where his life will intersect with Chance.

Chance is a mixed breed Pit Bull. He's been born and raised to fight and seldom leaves the dirty basement where he is kept between fights. But Chance is not a victim or a monster. It is Chance's unique spirit that helps him escape and puts him in the path of Adam.

What transpires is the story of one man, one dog, and how they save each other—in ways they never could have expected.

Author: Susan Wilson
First Release: 2010
ISBN: 978-0312662950
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
The Dog Who Danced

If there's been a theme in Justine Meade's life, it's loss. Her mother, her home, even her son. The one bright spot in her loss-filled life, the partner she could always count on, was Mack, her grey and black Sheltie – that is, until she is summoned back to her childhood home after more than twenty years away.

Ed and Alice Parmalee are mourning a loss of their own. Seven years after their daughter was taken from them, they're living separate lives together. Dancing around each other, and their unspeakable heartbreak, unable to bridge the chasm left between them. When they find a little black and gray dog by the side of the road, they take him in.

Fiercely loyal, acutely perceptive and guided by a herd dog's instinct, Mack has a way of bringing out the best in his humans. Whether it's as Justine's partner, or just the ebb and flow of a family's rhythms, it's as though the little Shetland Sheepdog was born to bring people together.

Everyone needs Mack. But to whom does the little dog who danced belong?

Author: Susan Wilson
First Release: 2012
ISBN: 978-1250023285
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
A Man of His Own

Rick Stanton was a promising professional baseball player with dreams of playing in the major leagues and starting a family with his young wife, Francesca, when World War II changed everything. 

Rick returns from the war with his body broken and his dreams shattered. But it was not just body and spirit he sacrificed for the war. He and Francesca volunteered their beloved dog, Pax, for the Army's K-9 Corp, not knowing if they'd ever see him again.

Keller Nicholson is the soldier who fought the war with Pax by his side, and the two have the kind of profound bond that can only be forged in war. Pax is the closest Keller has to a sense of family, and he can't bear the thought of returning him to the Stantons. But Rick and Francesca refuse to give him up. Instead, an arrangement is made: Keller will work as Rick's live-in aide. And thus an unlikely family is formed, with steadfast Pax at the center. 

As they try to build a new life out of the ashes, Keller and Francesca struggle to ignore their growing attraction to each other, and Rick, believing that he can no longer give Francesca what she needs and wants, quietly plans a way out.

Author: Susan Wilson
First Release: 2013
ISBN: 978-1250054487
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
The Dog Who Saved Me

Cooper Harrison, a member of the Boston K-9 unit, never thought he would ever go back to his hometown, Harmony Farms. But when his faithful canine partner, Argos, is killed in the line of duty, Cooper finds himself mired in grief. Jobless, on the verge of divorce, and in a self-destructive rut, Cooper has little choice but to accept an offer for the position of animal control officer in Harmony Farms.

And so he finds himself back where he started. Where his father, Bull, was once known as the town drunk. Where his brother, Jimmy, was a delinquent and a bully. Where he grew up as "one of those" Harrisons. 

Forced to face the past while dealing with the present--including his brother's continued involvement in the drug business--Cooper does his job with deliberate detachment, refusing to get emotionally invested in another dog the way he had with Argos. Until he finds himself rescuing a wounded and gun-shy yellow lab gone feral...

Cooper never thought he'd find himself going back in order to move forward, yet Harmony Farms is the one place where Cooper must learn to forgive and, only then, heal. All with the help of a yellow dog, who has a history--and secrets--that Cooper must uncover.

Author: Susan Wilson
First Release: 2015
ISBN: 978-1250080448
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Two Good Dogs

Single mom Skye Mitchell has sunk her last dime into a dream, owning the venerable, if run-down LakeView Hotel in the Berkshire Hills. It’s here where she believes she’ll give her fourteen-year-old daughter Cody a better life. But being an innkeeper is more challenging than she imagined, and Cody still manages to fall in with the wrong crowd. In addition, Cody is keeping an earth-shattering secret that she’s terrified to reveal. The once loving, open girl has now become completely withdrawn, and Skye is both desperate and helpless to reach her.

When Adam March and his pit bull Chance check into the hotel, it becomes the first of many visits. Here in these peaceful mountains he finds an unexpected relief from his recent bereavement. He and the beleaguered innkeeper form a tentative friendship. Adam knows the struggles of raising a difficult teenager and Skye understands loneliness.

And then there is Mingo, a street kid with a pit bull dog of his own. When Cody discovers an overdosed Mingo, Adam takes the boy’s dog not just for safekeeping, but to foster and then rehome. But the dog isn’t the only one who needs saving. A makeshift family begins to form as four lost people learn to trust and rely on each other, with the help of two good dogs.

Author: Susan Wilson
First Release: 2017
ISBN: 978-1250078131
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
The Dog I Loved

After spending years in prison for a crime she didn’t intend to commit, Rose Collins is suddenly free. Someone who knows about the good work she has done―training therapy dogs while serving time―has arranged for her early release. 

This mysterious benefactor has even set her up with a job in the coastal Massachusetts community of Gloucester, on the edge of Dogtown, a place of legend and, for the first time since Rosie's whole world came crashing down, hope. There she works to rebuild her life with the help of Shadow, a stray dog who appears one rainy night and refuses to leave Rose’s side.

Meghan Custer is a wheelchair-bound war veteran who used to be hopeless, too. Living at home with her devoted but stifling parents felt a lot like being in prison, in fact. But ever since she was matched with a service dog named Shark, who was trained in a puppy-to-prisoner rehabilitation program, Meghan has a brand new outlook. Finally, she can live on her own. Go to work. And maybe, with Shark by her side, even find love again.

Two strong women on a journey toward independence whose paths collide in extraordinary ways. Two dogs who somehow manage to save them both.

Author: Susan Wilson
First Release: 2019
ISBN: 978-1250078155
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
What a Dog Knows

Ruby Heartwood has always lived a life on the move. As a traveling psychic, she makes her living working at carnivals and festivals and circuses around New England. It's a life Ruby has made peace with―settling in one place has never been for her. She needs no one, and no one needs her.

Until one night, when she is camped by the side of the road in her trusty Volkswagon "Westie" van, a fierce thunder and lightning storm erupts. In the middle of the downpour, she hears a distinct voice telling her to "let me in." In jumps a little black and white dog, and to Ruby's astonishment, she can hear the dog's thoughts. Has she been struck by lightning? Did the storm do this? Is she losing her mind?

It turns out, Ruby can hear many dogs' thoughts. She decides to set up semi-permanent residency in the town of Harmony Farms, until she can sort out what is going on, and who the little dog, Hitch, belongs to. But some people in Harmony Farms don't want her there. And it seems that events keep preventing Ruby from leaving. What secrets is this town keeping? Why was she meant to find this dog? And what has Ruby really been running from, all these years?

Author: Susan Wilson
First Release: 2021
ISBN: 978-1250077271
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin

Omnibus Books

One Good Dog / The Dog Who Danced

Two novels in one volume:

One Good Dog

Adam March is a self-made "Master of the Universe." He has it all: the beautiful wife, the high-powered job, the glittering circle of friends. But there is a price to be paid for all these trappings, and the pressure is mounting—until the day Adam makes a fatal mistake. His assistant leaves him a message with three words: your sister called.

What no one knows is that Adam's sister has been missing for decades. That she represents the excruciatingly painful past he has left behind. And that her absence has secretly tormented him all these years. When his assistant brushes off his request for an explanation in favor of her more pressing personal call, Adam loses it. And all hell breaks loose.

Adam is escorted from the building. He loses his job. He loses his wife. He loses the life he's worked so hard to achieve. He doesn't believe it is possible to sink any lower when he is assigned to work in a soup kitchen as a form of community service. But unbeknownst to Adam, this is where his life will intersect with Chance.

The Dog Who Danced

If there's been a theme in Justine Meade's life, it's loss. Her mother, her home, even her son. The one bright spot in her loss-filled life, the partner she could always count on, was Mack, her grey and black Sheltie – that is, until she is summoned back to her childhood home after more than twenty years away.

Ed and Alice Parmalee are mourning a loss of their own. Seven years after their daughter was taken from them, they're living separate lives together. Dancing around each other, and their unspeakable heartbreak, unable to bridge the chasm left between them. When they find a little black and gray dog by the side of the road, they take him in.

Everyone needs Mack. But to whom does the little dog who danced belong?

Author: Susan Wilson
First Release: 2017
ISBN: 978-1250140579
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin