Here's a description on True Believer:
Jeremy Marsh is the ultimate New Yorker: handsome, almost always dressed in black, and part of the media elite. An expert on debunking the supernatural with a regular column in “Scientific American,” he’s just made his first appearance on national TV. When he receives a letter from the tiny town of Boone Creek, North Carolina, about ghostly lights that appear in a legend-shrouded cemetery, he can’t resist driving down to investigate. Here, in this tightly knit community, Lexie Darnell runs the town’s library, just as her mother did before the accident that left Lexie an orphan. Disappointed by past relationships, including one that lured her away from home, she is sure of one thing: her future is in Boone Creek, close to her grandmother and all the other people she loves. Jeremy expects to spend a quick week in “the sticks” before speeding back to the city. But from the moment he sets eyes on Lexie, he is intrigued and attracted to this beautiful woman who speaks with a soft drawl and confounding honesty. And Lexie, while hesitating to trust this outsider, finds herself thinking of Jeremy more than she cares to admit. Now, if they are to be together, Jeremy Marsh must make a difficult choice: return to the life he knows, or do something he’s never done before—take a giant leap of faith. A story about taking chances and following your heart, True Believer will make you, too, believe in the miracle of love.
Here are some interesting facts:
True Believer is not inspired by any of Nicholas’s family members, but the protagonist, Lexie Darnell, is named after one of Nicholas’s twin daughters?
Boone Creek—the setting for the novel—is a fictitious town in North Carolina, modeled after Pamlico County?
True Believer was one of two books that Nicholas wrote in a year? (The second is At First Sight, the sequel to True Believer.)
Some Book FAQs:
Have you sold the film rights?
Yes. Rights have been sold for both True Believer and At First Sight.
Is Boone Creek a real place?
No, Boone Creek is entirely fictitious. In my imagination, I placed it somewhere in Pamlico County, but that’s as far as it went.
Was this novel inspired by any family members?
No. Like The Guardian, True Believer was fictitious. Lexie Darnell, however, was modeled after my wife.
Have you ever seen a ghost?
I think so. I’m sort of like Jeremy in that I’m a skeptic, but I once visited a house of a friend that may—or may not—have been haunted. All I know is that I regularly saw movement from the corner of my eye, but when I glanced that way, I would see nothing at all. My wife, too, had some strange experiences while we were there, as did the owners. My wife and the owners, by the way, were certain it was a ghost.
Why did you decide to write a sequel to True Believer?
Three reasons: first, I wanted to give the story—in its entirety—the number of pages it deserved. Second, I’ve always wanted to write a story about ‘what happens next?’ In my previous novels, my characters fell in love, but I’ve never had the opportunity to explore what happens after the initial stage of the relationship. And third, my goal as a novelist is to surprise the reader by telling new stories in different ways, and a novel with a direct sequel was something I’d never done before.
Where did you get the idea for the mysterious lights in the cemetery? How about the legend that Doris tells Jeremy?
The lights in the cemetery were modeled after the Brown Mountain Lights, mysterious lights that have appeared for decades in western North Carolina. The legend was a figment of my imagination.