"The Texan Duke"

Karen Ranney wanted to be a writer from the time she was five years old and filled her Big Chief tablet with stories. People in stories did amazing things and she was too shy to do anything amazing. Years spent in Japan, Paris, and Italy, however, not only fueled her imagination but proved she wasn't that shy after all.

Now a New York Times and USA Today bestseller, she prefers to keep her adventures between the covers of her books.

Ranney applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, The Texan Duke, and reported the following:

Page 69 (hardcover) is a critical part of the book. It’s where Connor McCraight has to decide his next course of action. Does he choose Plan A or does he go with Plan B? He issued instructions to the family solicitor on that page, instructions that were going to change the course of his Scottish family’s future. As for Connor, he couldn’t wait to get back to Texas. First of all, it was familiar. Secondly, it was warmer. Much, much warmer.

As Connor thinks:

This was not his home. This wasn’t his land, for all that it was his father’s birthplace.

He’d been born on the XIV Ranch with his father and a grizzled ranch hand in attendance. As he’d been told, Matt Thompson had a lot of experience with pulling calves and it looked like he was going to have to use it in helping to birth the last of the McCraight brood.

His mother, as stubborn a woman as he’d ever met, had decided that she didn’t need anyone other than one of the maids with her. He’d been born ten hours later, the largest of the six McCraight children and — as his father would attest — the loudest.

In the end, it wasn’t a huge decision to leave Scotland. He didn’t want to adapt to a strange land, a strange culture, and an even stranger family.

His only regret about leaving Scotland was a woman named Elsbeth Carew, his uncle’s ward. Leaving Elsbeth might prove to be difficult.

Visit Karen Ranney's website.

--Marshal Zeringue