A well-crafted Gothic suspense story with an engaging heroine.
An aspiring private investigator uncovers a mystery when she takes a job as an au pair.
Ashley Smeeton always dreamed of becoming a sleuth. When she was 9, she witnessed her first investigation when a murder mystery unfolded in her hometown. Now in her mid-20s, she has set up an agency in Montreal, but she is unable to accept clients until she receives her license from the government. In need of cash, she accepts a summer job as an au pair at Columbine Lodge in the Laurentian Mountains. Her client is Layla Sampson, a single mother with a 4-year-old daughter, Meade. When Ashley arrives at the lodge, she encounters an eccentric and wealthy but deeply dysfunctional family. Lionel Sampson owns the lodge and controls the finances. Along with Layla and Meade, he shares the home with his sister, Edyth, and nephew, Peter. After a slow start, Ashley bonds with the quiet but perceptive Meade and befriends members of the household staff, including the charming and seductive Jon Perez. What begins as a routine job takes an ominous turn when residents of the lodge die suddenly, and Ashley is drawn into a web of family secrets and treachery. Dowdall’s (After the Winter, 2017) latest novel offers a resourceful heroine, atmospheric settings, and well-plotted suspense. First introduced in After the Winter, Ashley is a likable heroine whose inquisitive nature helps her navigate the complicated dynamics of the Sampson family. Dowdall skillfully uses the settings throughout the tale, including the bustling city of Montreal—featuring “the thundering boxcars and the whine of the electric train”—and the lodge with its unique hillside design. Although the settings are effective, there are a few similarities between the lodge and Midwinter, the Quebec estate in After the Winter. Both are remote estates owned by wealthy but troubled families. Perhaps Ashley’s next case will keep her in Montreal. The storytelling is strong and confident, and Dowdall includes enough back story to satisfy both newcomers and established fans of the series. This installment should appeal to fans of Louise Penny.
A well-crafted Gothic suspense story with an engaging heroine.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5092-1736-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: The Wild Rose Press, Inc.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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