Courting the Doctor's Daughter

Janet Dean
Inspirational Historical Romance
Steeple Hill Books - 2009

Who would have thought the handsome man hawking his herbal elixir from the seat of his wagon was a real medical doctor and heir to a vast Boston fortune? While physically engaging, he still looked the huckster to Mary Graves, and she knew that the magic in most such potions was alcohol, making it more dangerous than medicinal. Her dad was the town doctor. That gave Mary more than a passing knowledge of such frauds. Unwilling to let this man dupe her friends from the town, she challenged Luke Jacobs in front his gullible audience. That prickly encounter begins Janet Dean’s second novel, Courting the Doctor’s Daughter.

Mary Graves openly called Luke Jacobs a fraud. Of course, he hadn’t yet divulged that he was a medical doctor. He was, in fact, searching for his lost son. He had heard that his son was put on an orphanage train after his mother died. He was following the route the train had taken. He didn’t want it known that he was looking for his son. Since he had lost track of him, he wanted to find him and make sure he had a good home without disturbing him.

Luke had lost track of his son because he was so busy with his laboratory work. His mission was to find a cure for epilepsy. His brother had had epilepsy and died too young in an institution.

This is a book of losses. Luke had lost his brother and blamed his parents for his treatment. He thought an institution was the wrong place for an epileptic. He had separated from his parents over this issue. Mary Graves had been left on the doctor’s doorstep when she was a baby and had lost her mother. While the doctor and his wife loved her and treated her well, she still wondered why she wasn’t good enough for her mother to keep her. Psychologically, this kept her from feeling as good about herself as she might have. She had niggling doubts about herself. Because of that, she adopted a child off the orphanage train since she knew what a loss being an orphan had brought to her life. She already had two children from an unsatisfactory marriage. She had a very busy, work-filled life for a widow. Somehow she felt that’s all she deserved.

Courting the Doctor’s Daughter is the second book of a projected Steeple Hill series. The first was Courting Miss Adelaide. Janet Dean grew up in what she describes as a story telling family. Her folks and their folks loved the past and telling stories about it. Not surprisingly, Janet caught the bug and once she and her husband had raised their two girls, she devoted herself to writing stories that would honor God and take the reader on satisfying adventures.