Next Steps follows is the third and last book in the Sally Paddington women's fiction series, following "Roundabout" and "LAF - Life After Felix."
The struggle of seventy-year-old Sally Paddington as confronts her lifelong fear of being judged or abandoned. A year after the death of her beloved Felix, beginning to emerge from hibernation, both issues come to a head.
She finds herself accused of embezzling foundation funds she had hoped to direct to needy causes, and the one person equipped to help her is Sam Parker, an admirer whom, in her wariness of being hurt, she has shunned.
The story moves between Cape Town, where the home she shared with Felix, has been damaged in a fire, and Portland, OR, where Felix's daughter lives, and so does Sam.
As she tackles the legal and personal challenges, she is also facing a professional one--finishing a book about the therapeutic power of dance, which she and Felix started together. Her former husband, Charles, has stepped in to help with its publication, and he has also found for her relatives she never knew had survived the Holocaust.
All of these relationships call for her to learn from past mistakes, to take risks, and to step into her seventies with a whole new level of courage.
