Relative Strangers

Relative Strangers is a romance by Jessica Steele. The book places its heroine abroad and alone, which lets the story begin with a misunderstanding that can only be resolved by staying in a place where she is not welcome.

Zarah goes to Dalvik to answer a question about her own parentage, an errand with no financial motive behind it that anyone there can see. Stein, the stepson of her late aunt, reads her arrival as a claim on money, and the inheritance he accuses her of pursuing is something she discovers only after she has made the journey. The novel's tension is the gap between her real reason for coming and the motive the family has assigned to her.

Her defence, that another person's opinion of her is not her problem, does not hold, and the book is about watching it fail. Steele wrote many short romances in which a misunderstanding about money, family or reputation has to be repaired before the couple can be honest with each other, and this is a straightforward example of that pattern, set in a small coastal community where everyone already knows the local version of the story.