We’ll Always Have Paris

In this pleasant but forgettable contemporary romance, Watson (Love, Lies, and Lemon Cake) shows older lovers balancing family responsibilities with a developing relationship. When Rosie Carter loses her beloved husband, Mike, to cancer, she regrets that they never fulfilled Mike’s dream of stargazing from New Zealand. Rosie herself had once yearned to visit Paris with Peter, the glamorous boyfriend she met at art school, but after he dumped her, she returned home to Manchester, England, and got over her heartbreak with Mike. A year after Mike’s death, Peter reappears as the most desirable of exes: a well-known photographer, still handsome in middle age, comfortably well off, penitent, smitten, and eager to please. Even though Rosie’s adult daughters are wary and rude to him, he’s clearly a catch, which lowers the stakes of Rosie’s worry about how to include him in her life without upsetting the family. Though Peter is sometimes hard to believe in, readers looking for later-life romances will enjoy the depiction of the warm and sexy connection that builds between these two sweet 60-somethings. (Apr.)