{"id":445830,"date":"2026-11-03T05:32:08","date_gmt":"2026-11-03T05:32:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/445830\/"},"modified":"2026-11-03T05:32:08","modified_gmt":"2026-11-03T05:32:08","slug":"st-pete-author-takes-amazon-prime-on-a-romantic-drive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/445830\/","title":{"rendered":"St. Pete author takes Amazon Prime on a romantic \u2018Drive\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

For rock-solid proof that Hallmark hasn\u2019t cornered the market on twisty boy-meets-girl romance movies, consider Drive \u2013 The Pretenders, newly available on Amazon Prime.<\/p>\n

The boy is Dante, a hunky, bad-boy superstar driver on the Formula One racing circuit. Women melt in his presence. His female counterpart is Sarah, a plucky, pragmatic mechanic assigned to Dante\u2019s team. She\u2019s immune to his charms. But Sarah aspires to drive those fast, hot cars too.<\/p>\n

They each have secrets.<\/p>\n

The Florida connection: It\u2019s based on Drive, a 2015 romance novel by St. Petersburg author Tamara Lush.<\/p>\n

A former journalist, Lush has written 25 books to date. Initially, her chosen genre was romance, but after the pandemic she changed her focus to mystery novels, set in Florida. She writes these under the name Tara Lush.<\/p>\n

What makes Drive different is that the characters, and the actors, are German, the dialogue is in German (you can watch it with subtitles, or with dubbed-in English, French or Spanish).<\/p>\n

The film was made by Bavaria Fiction, a German production company, and shot in Germany, the Czech Republic and on the breathlessly beautiful Mediterranean coastline of Sorrento, Italy.<\/p>\n

Unlike Hallmark\u2019s cookie cutters, Drive is very sleek and very Euro. It moves fast. The music is hot.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Author Tamara Lush visited the set of \u201cDrive\u201d in Italy. From left, director Sergej Moya, Koroll, Lush, Baahmed and co-producer Karsten G\u00fcnther.<\/p>\n

Getting a movie made from her work, Lush said, \u201cwas never a goal of mine. It was never a dream. It was not something I even entertained. The odds of that are very, very low.\u201d<\/p>\n

Drive, she explained, was her second novel. \u201cI was just kind of feeling out what sort of a writer I was.\u201d<\/p>\n

LEARN MORE: Arts Alive! podcast: Author Tamara Lush<\/a><\/p>\n

Lush, her father and her husband are all longtime fans of Formula One racing. She set the book in that world simply because she knew something about it, planting her young lovers in the middle of the high-stakes European racing circuit.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re going to dream, you might as well dream big.<\/p>\n

After Harlequin rejected the manuscript, Lush self-published it, then put it up on Wattpad, the online sharing platform for writers and readers.<\/p>\n

On the site, Drive was read three million times. Wattpad re-published the print edition in 2022.<\/p>\n

(Drive is the first book in Lush\u2019s series The Pretenders; all three are set in the world of auto racing, although the Dante and Sarah story does not carry over.)<\/p>\n

Once Bavaria Fiction got involved, Lush said, she knew her work was in good hands.<\/p>\n

\"\"\u201cObviously, I wouldn\u2019t want them to turn my book into something racist, sexist, something objectionable, but I knew that they wouldn\u2019t. So it wasn\u2019t really a concern for me.<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause frankly, I love what they did to it. I actually think that the way they handled it is better than the way I handled it in the book. I was just starting to learn to write romance, so I put a lot in the book that maybe I wouldn\u2019t have put in.\u201d<\/p>\n

The producers and screenwriters did make changes, in the characters and in the story.<\/p>\n

\u201cI love the book, and I love the movie, but I think the way the movie did it was really good,\u201d Lush enthused. \u201cAnd I can see why they made the choices they did, and I fully agree with them.<\/p>\n

\u201cHere\u2019s the thing. The way I feel about my work, in general, is that once I\u2019m done with it, and once the public reads it, it is no longer mine. I don\u2019t really worry about what other people do or think.\u201d<\/p>\n

She has a new murder mystery novel coming out this month, a \u201cbonkers romp\u201d titled The Florist\u2019s Guide to Homicide.<\/p>\n

Set in Sunny Shores, Florida, a town bearing a striking resemblance to Gulfport, Lush calls it The Golden Girls Meet Only Murders in the Building.<\/p>\n

Drive \u2013 The Pretenders is generating massively positive reactions from young viewers, on TikTok, Instagram and other social media platforms.<\/p>\n

Will there be a sequel? \u201cA lot of people are asking. I\u2019d love to know, too! I\u2019m hopeful,\u201d Lush said.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo me, it\u2019s all just gravy. I never anticipated this would happen, and so it\u2019s just a really cool experience. Especially because I don\u2019t write romance any more.<\/p>\n

\u201cAlthough I have to say, it\u2019s gotten me to think about writing more romance again. But I\u2019ve been busy killing people in my mysteries in Florida.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For rock-solid proof that Hallmark hasn\u2019t cornered the market on twisty boy-meets-girl romance movies, consider Drive \u2013 The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":445831,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[202,204,203,199,201,200],"class_list":["post-445830","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-st-petersburg","tag-st-pete","tag-st-pete-headlines","tag-st-pete-news","tag-st-petersburg","tag-st-petersburg-headlines","tag-st-petersburg-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/445830","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=445830"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/445830\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/445831"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=445830"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=445830"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=445830"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}