And a Happy New You

Despite her secular mindset, Rachel Marie’s cousin, Samantha Kidd, is drafted to join the Bangkok Christian School team to fill in for a semester teaching calculus. Recently divorced and seething with bitterness, she arrives with seven-year-old Paloma in tow, and struggles to meet the Thai cultural norm of soft-spoken tranquility. Not entirely sure she’s ready to embrace Christianity, Samantha soon begins to fall for Tommy Daggett, the school’s joke-loving choir director. Listeners are pulled into a pulse-pounding adventure involving a battle of wits with kingpins in Thailand’s rampant sex industry. “And a Happy New You” follows up the charm and Asian glow of Smith’s debut novel, “Love in a Distant Land.” Bangkok is a fascinating setting for a love story, and Samantha is quickly enamored of the quirky delights of teaching Thai teenagers in BCS’s “Matthayom” high school section. There are budding romances galore among the students, and the story twinkles with hormones as kids watch thei