THE THIRD LIFE

by Caroline Gray ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 9, 1988

Gray's hard-cover debut: a romantic thriller set in 1932 that starts out well enough by entangling an innocent in the internecine struggles of an international vice-ring. Twenty-one-year-old Julie Allen is the novel's heroine and naif, educated in a Swiss boarding school, motherless, and entirely ignorant of her father's other life as the kingpin of the Association--until she's called home to London to identify his body at the morgue. He's been murdered by his underworld cohorts because he's had his hand in the till--to the tune of 20 million. Too many people turn up to help Julie, including Major Roberts (or Uncle Bob)--who claims to be an old friend of her father's--and young Teddy Longman, an American student who happened upon Papa Allen's body while walking on the moors. Both try to ensnare her with kisses, but she falls for Teddy, and marries him just as she begins to learn the truth about her dad. (""I thought I was the daughter of one of the finest men on earth, and that made me very happy,"" she says. ""Now I've discovered that I am the daughter of maybe the most vicious man who ever lived. I suppose that makes me correspondingly unhappy."") Her search for her father's stashed fortune takes her to New York, where she learns that Dad wasn't so bad after all. The plot quickly grows messy beyond proportion, and in the end it's just too hard to buy the notion that this quietly reared English rose could become a gun-toting moll.

Pub Date: Jan. 9, 1988

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1988

Categories: FICTION