An often engaging inspirational tale.
Retired journalist and radio broadcaster Jackson offers a debut mystery series-starter set in the music business, starring a middle-aged woman who rises to fame as a manager in Nashville’s Music Row.
Life isn’t treating Sarah Ann Boswell well lately. After her 26-year marriage to a high-powered attorney ends, she loses her job as vice president of community outreach for a charitable foundation, and things look bleak for her. In a fateful moment, she tries to end it all by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. Lucky for Sarah Ann, she’s rushed to the hospital before reaching the point of no return. With her ever faithful prayer group and her two adult children supporting her, Sarah Ann manages to face her situation, and she begins to recover. Jill Edgerton, the founder of a Nashville music-management firm, happens to be recuperating in the next bed. She offers Sarah Ann her friendship and a job—two things that Sarah Ann can’t pass up. Shortly after hitching her wagon to Jill’s, she meets musician Jared Parson, who “has the looks of a young Vince Gill, hips like Elvis, and a voice to challenge Blake Shelton.” The women immediately sign him as a client and later produce his CD, which hits the top of the charts. But something isn’t quite right about the new country star. And when someone turns up dead, Sarah Ann knows something is very, very wrong. Jackson’s writing wraps the reader in Southern charm, channeling Southern Living and offering recipes reminiscent of those in Paula Deen’s Southern Cooking Bible. When Sarah Ann isn’t meeting with her prayer group—which is apparently designed more for venting than praying—she’s attending the Grand Ole Opry or eating barbecued ribs. But although Jackson’s story is engaging throughout, its main plotline is delayed; although a minor mystery is alluded to in Chapter 8, the real one doesn’t get going until Chapter 26. Characters spend the remaining 11 chapters figuring out whodunit and encountering some overly helpful coincidences (including one involving a very clear fingerprint) and unoriginal motives (money and sex). But although the mystery isn’t challenging, it remains entertaining to the end.
An often engaging inspirational tale.Pub Date: May 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-948679-05-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: WordCrafts Press
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
