Excerpt from Blue Diary by Alice Hoffman, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

She closes her eyes on this, their stolen morning, and as she lets the phone ring unanswered, she thinks again of lilies, shimmering on their green stems. She thinks about the pledges they've made to each other, and about devotion. What she feels for him is so deep, she aches. She supposes this is what people refer to when they say the pangs of love, as if your innermost joy cannot help but cause you anguish as well. It is painful when he leaves her merely to go into the kitchen, where he fixes them iced coffees and bowls of strawberries from the garden. He loads their breakfast onto a silver tray, a wedding present from Charlotte, and brings it back to bed for them to enjoy. Jorie still has never seen a man as handsome as Ethan. He has dark hair and even darker eyes. He isn't a lawyer cooped up in an office like Barney Stark, whose wife complains that he's grown fat, or a beer drinker like Mark Derry, who spends most evenings sprawled out in an easy chair. Ethan uses his body, and the results are evident. When he takes off his shirt at the baseball field, the women stare at him, then look at each other as if to say, That's what I wanted, but that's not what I got.

All the same, Ethan is the sort of man who doesn't seem to be aware of his own good looks. His visits to the gym aren't driven by vanity, but are a necessity for the work he does as a member of the Monroe Volunteer Fire Department. He needs strength and stamina, both readily apparent last fall when he climbed onto the roof of the McConnells' house, long before many of his fellow volunteers had gotten out of their trucks. That particular fire had started in a pan of bacon, but by the time the first volunteers arrived, it was burning through the house, one of those sly, scarlet infernos that moves with unexpected speed. There was so much smoke that day, the white chrysanthemums outside Hannah's Coffee Shoppe turned gray and remained that way for the rest of the season; frogs in the shallows of the lake began to dig themselves into the dirt, ready to hibernate, misreading the ashes falling from above for an early dusting of snow.

When it became clear that the regulation ladder wouldn't reach the McConnells' little girl's window, Ethan had taken matters into his own hands. From his perch on the roof, he went on; he pulled himself across the shingles and over the peak, then went in through the window. Outside, the crowd watched as though bewitched. Not a word was said after Ethan disappeared through the window, especially not after the flames rose up, a burst of heat circling into the clotted gray sky. Ethan found the child hiding in her closet, and it was a lucky thing he'd been so nimble scaling the roof, for the girl hadn't more than a few minutes left before she would have begun to suffocate. By the time Ethan carried her out of the house, half the town was gathered on the lawn below, holding their breaths, inhaling smoke, blinking the soot from their eyes.

It's no wonder that people in Monroe adore Ethan Ford. Why, even Jorie's sister, Anne, who on most occasions cannot find a nice word to say about anyone, is surprisingly well-behaved in his presence. There's rarely a time when Ethan walks down Front Street and some child he once coached doesn't lean out a car window in order to shout his name and wave. The parents are just as pleased to see him; they honk their horns and switch their headlights on and off in a show of appreciation. Warren Peck, the bartender at the Safehouse and a courageous volunteer fireman himself, refuses to let Ethan pay for his own drinks, and why shouldn't he be grateful? Ethan was the first on the scene when Warren's nephew Kyle's Chrysler LeBaron caught on fire in the parking lot of Lantern Lake, with sweet-tempered Kyle sleeping it off in the front seat, sure to have been burned alive if not for Ethan's intervention. The senior center, where Ethan serves Thanksgiving dinner each year before coming home to celebrate the holiday with his family, still has a banner up in the rec room: Three Cheers for Ethan. Ethan himself would have already torn down that banner if the very idea didn't chill some of the seniors to their bones, for the residents of the center sleep better with the knowledge that Ethan is watching over them.

Reprinted from Blue Diary by Alice Hoffman by permission of G.P. Putnam’s Sons, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. Copyright © 2001 by Alice Hoffman. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.