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 their own “Miss Kidd” slowly fall in love.

David cops to a bit of a literary crutch when it came to creating the Tommy Daggett character. “For some reason I got actor Jack Black’s face and voice in my brain–the rest was easy!” Tommy is adored by the students in his choir, and his wisecracking brand of Christianity is an appealing factor in Samantha’s own journey of faith. One reviewer writes: “Book 2 is a tour de force!”

David is also the author of the time-travel trilogy, “The Time Portal,” which hurtles an iPod’s owner to long-ago classic misadventures like a ride aboard Titanic or to Omaha Beach, June 6, 1944. He grew up in Bangkok and loves crafting stories with colorful characters and unpredictable plot twists. Jump into the Rachel Marie adventure; there are ten vibrant adventures waiting for you!

David is a just-retired math professor and always brightens whenever a student from Thailand invades his trigonometry classes! He has two grown daughters and four perfect grandchildren.