A light, entertaining novel about greed, marital love and the inexplicable desire for solitude.
In Archdeacon’s debut novel, a 58-year-old millionaire and member of the Queen’s Counsel sells his house and belongings in an attempt to begin a new life alone while his wife is away.
John Penry-Hudson is a hard-working, respectable lawyer en route to fulfilling his dream of serving as one of Her Majesty’s judges. His wife, Phyllis, has been spending increasingly lengthy amounts of time with her aging mother a few hours away. When Phyllis takes a three-month leave, John suddenly decides to simply up and leave his wife, his lucrative career and his native country—seemingly without forethought or motivation. The day Phyllis departs, John embarks upon a hasty, complicated plan to sell the house (which was solely in his name), write a series of letters to cover his tracks and convince everyone that his wife has left him. Just as everything begins falling into place and John successfully escapes to Spain briefly in an attempt to foil potential pursuers, Phyllis suddenly appears at his hotel with a detective, resulting in an international chase that takes John to France, Switzerland and an imaginary country called Grundia, where he intends to settle. Because John has technically done nothing illegal, he’s off the hook—that is until his wife, either spurred by love or vengeance, takes matters into her own hands. Written in clean, safe prose that occasionally drags—particularly in the overwrought dialogue and while John gets his affairs in order—Archdeacon’s novel is a fun, domestic thriller reminiscent of some of Graham Greene’s work. But something is missing; from the beginning, John’s motivations are frustratingly unclear. “He had originally intended to teach Phyllis a lesson she would never forget,” the narrator explains nearly a third of the way into the book, and until this point, aside from explaining that John and Phyllis’s relationship was fairly stable, that is as much information as the narration provides, leaving much of the storyline feeling frivolous without any context for their relationship. Still, the confusion behind John’s apparent lack of impetus offers enough tension to keep the pages turning.
A light, entertaining novel about greed, marital love and the inexplicable desire for solitude.Pub Date: July 22, 2008
ISBN: 978-1434338686
Page Count: 302
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
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