The Return of Jonah Gray

Despite being attractive, intelligent and friendly, Sasha Gardner knows no man wants a phone call from her. Because Sasha is— a tax auditor for the IRS.

Every job has its downside. Auditing may interfere with her social life, but it's orderly. It makes sense. And sh's very, very good at it. But when unexpected complaints draw her into the tax return of a man sh's never met, nothing seems to make sense anymore.

Using the information in Jonah Gray's return, Sasha begins to assemble his life story: a rising career as a respected financial reporter, a house in a posh seaside village, weekends sailing the coast—it all reads like a life Sasha herself had dreamed of living, down to the guy's itemized deductions. So why had he left it behind to cover school-board meetings in a one-newspaper town?

What begins as a welcome distraction soon becomes a search for answers. Sasha knows it's ridiculous—sh's never even laid eyes on him—but she wouldn't be the first woman to fall for a man who looks good on paper—.

A by-the-numbers woman pursues an earthy beau in Cochran's above-average second novel. Sasha Gardner, a 31-year-old IRS senior auditor, is, of course, single, to the dismay of her mother. Her last boyfriend was a dud, and Sasha is merciless when sizing up potential dates, but the new archivist at work, Jeff Hill, passes muster; his "touch of OCD" complements Sasha's detail-orientation. Besides, with increasingly troublesome family drama, a terminally ill father and a series of strange phone calls at the office, Sasha could use distraction. Her relationship, however, is derailed as she's smacked with a taboo crush: Jonah Gray, the journalist, proprietor of a popular gardening Web site and, unfortunately, an auditee. As Sasha sifts through Gray's financial data, the man becomes more and more intriguing, and her professional queries only leave her more curious. Cochran's novel is better written than most in the genre, and her take on the divergent lives of arborists and accountants is both poignant and humorous. (Mar.)
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Sasha Gardner is a tad obsessive, which is just fine with her job as an auditor for the IRS. When she starts receiving angry calls haranguing her for auditing a man she has never heard of, she's puzzled, until she learns a man named Jonah Gray has written on his Web site about the letter he received from her about a random audit. Sasha finds herself increasingly curious about Jonah, and what begins as a simple audit turns into anything but when the details about Jonah's life--that he left a high-paying job at the Wall Street Journal to work for a small-town paper, that he takes care of his elderly father--make her want to get to know the man behind the tax returns. But with her own father gravely ill and the new archivist at the office showing interest in her, Sasha isn't sure she's willing to risk her heart by pursuing a man she's never met. Cochran's second outing is both quirky and highly original. Kristine Huntley
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