In the Cover to Cover studio this month with St.John Flynn is Augusta author Karin Gillespie, and they'll be talking and taking listener calls about Karin's latest novel Dollar Daze: The Bottom Dollar Girls in Love (Simon and Schuster, 2006), the third in her Bottom Dollar Girls series.

The Bottom Dollar Girls are back with a sugar-spun vengeance in Dollar Daze: The Bottom Dollar Girls in Love. Broaching the age-old question – Is it ever too late to find one's heart's desire? – these feisty ladies (of a certain age!) of Cayboo Creek, South Carolina, are suddenly blindsided by schoolgirl flights of fancy when unexpected romance enters their lives.

The toll-free number to call during the program is 1-866-RADIO GA (1-866-723-4642).

From the Book Jacket

Moons and Junes are the flavors of the month for the Bottom Dollar Girls, whose sudden fondness for wooing and cooing has them in a Dollar Daze. From the night of the Sweetheart Dance, love begins blooming all over Cayboo Creek. Though every rose must have its thorn, it's up to the Bottom Dollar Girls to follow their hearts.

Leading the way is Attalee, soda jerk at the Bottom Dollar Emporium, who's so hot and heavy with her beau, Dooley, that the pair seems headed for the altar via Thrill Hill. Elizabeth is pining for her newlywed days when she felt more like a wife than a mother, while widowed Mavis has been up nights nursing a case of loneliness.

Not so for newspaperwoman Birdie. "I'm glad my dating days are done," she claims, and Gracie Tobias agrees that she, too, is "done with romance." They couldn't be more wrong. When high school heartthrob Brewster Clark returns to Cayboo Creek, suddenly Mavis and Birdie are competing for the attention of a certain pair of emerald eyes.

Then there's Rusty, a philosophical duct doctor who's a most unlikely gentleman to turn proper Gracie's head until she finds that his charms work on her like the Fountain of Youth. "A match made in heaven," Attalee pronounces the couple, but has she spoken too soon?

When it comes to love stories, "happily ever after" might always be the best ending, but one that can never be taken for granted. Traveling love's rocky road keeps the Bottom Dollar Girls asking, "How can you still believe in romance?" In Dollar Daze, these best of friends, through laughter and tears, discover that endings sting, but the pain makes new beginnings that much sweeter.

About the Author

Before becoming a novelist, Karin (pronounced [KAAR-in]) Gillespie was a special education teacher at an inner-city school and an editor for a regional parenting magazine.

She has a son named Brandon and, for seventeen years, she was a single mom. In May 2005 she married David Neches, a musician.

The first two books in the Bottom Dollar Girls series are Bet Your Bottom Dollar (2004) and A Dollar Short (2005).

Karin travels the Southeast with three other Southern authors, and they call themselves the Dixie Divas. She is the founder of the Girlfriends' Cyber Circuit, a virtual tour for women novelists. Born and raised in Minnesota, Karin moved to the South when she was 13. She now lives in Augusta, Ga.

For more information about Karin, visit her website, www.karingillespie.com .

Praise for Karin Gillespie and Dollar Daze

• "Use your very last bottom dollar, if you have to. Just BUY THIS BOOK. You will laugh yourself sick and love every minute of it."--Jill Conner Browne, author of The Sweet Potato Queen

• "The characters are the kind of steel magnolias who would make Scarlett O'Hara envious."--The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

• "It takes talent to sustain this level of comic writing for over 300 pages. Gillespie keeps the ball in the air, spinning madly, until the end."--Diane Whiter, The Boston Globe