An engaging tale, enhanced by its moody, threatening New Orleans setting.
A rape trial is the unlikely cause of a reunion among three troubled friends.
When Nora’s former college roommate Simone offers to pay for a plane ticket if Nora will meet her in New Orleans for a week of fun, it seems like a good idea. Thirty-seven-year-old Nora has recently separated from her husband, who’s skipped town (one step ahead of the tax men) with his young girlfriend, and she could use a vacation. That’s not, however, exactly what she gets. It turns out that Simone, now a well-known food critic, has summoned Nora and Poppy (the other roommate) to keep her on an even keel while she testifies against the man who raped her a year ago, when she was in town writing a piece on “romantic New Orleans.” This is the first Nora and Poppy have heard about the incident, and as they endure the trial, the three women get reacquainted and struggle with their individual demons. Nora is sympathetic, though too overwhelmed by her own recent troubles to provide unconditional support; Poppy, a wealthy New Orleans native, is now deeply into religion and proposes that Simone’s rape is part of God’s will—and she implies, furthermore, that her friend may be lying. Indeed, Simone’s story starts to unravel during the course of the trial. Thrown into the mix is Leo, an ethics teacher by day and cabbie by night who rescues Nora from a potential mugging and then turns out to be Poppy’s high-school sweetheart. As the trial winds down, Poppy becomes increasingly unhinged (insisting there is a baby buried in the cellar of her ancestral home), and Nora toys with Leo as she comes to terms with her failed marriage. The story’s not high on the narrative-excitement scale, but Hall (Close to Home, 1997, etc.) compensates for that with a convincing depiction of three women at midlife, atoning for past mistakes and tentatively moving forward.
An engaging tale, enhanced by its moody, threatening New Orleans setting.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-86319-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
Thriller fans will find so much space devoted to Gia and Jake’s sexual acrobatics that little time is left for the plot to...
A small Tennessee mountain town is awash in sex and scandal in Belle’s first novel.
Gia Andrews, a disaster relief worker, is also a convicted murderer’s daughter. Her father, Ray, was convicted of killing his wife and Gia’s stepmother, Ella Mae, and sentenced to life in prison. But Ray is dying, and prison officials are releasing him on compassionate grounds; Gia’s uncle Cal, a prominent lawyer, has recruited her to return home from Kenya to care for her dad in his home in Rogersville. Despite the fact that she hasn’t seen her father since she left many years ago, she returns, believing her brother, Bo, and sister, Lexi, will help her, but she finds that neither wants anything to do with their father. Her nearest allies turn out to be the home-care worker Uncle Cal has hired, Fannie, and the new man she meets, a bar-and-grill owner named Jake. When Gia meets a law professor planning to write a book about wrongful convictions, he tells her he believes Ray didn’t kill Ella Mae and that Cal, who was Ray’s attorney, didn’t mount much of a defense. After looking into these allegations, Gia discovers her stepmother had an affair with another man and wonders whether her father could be innocent after all. While trying to unravel the mystery of who really killed Ella Mae, things heat up between Gia and Jake, and suddenly the mystery takes a whole new direction. Belle’s a smooth writer whose characters are vibrant and truly reflect the area where the novel is set, but the plot—while clever—takes a back seat to Gia’s and Ella Mae’s separate, but equally steamy, sexual exploits.
Thriller fans will find so much space devoted to Gia and Jake’s sexual acrobatics that little time is left for the plot to develop.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7783-1722-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harlequin MIRA
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
The late (d. 1988), leathery, awesomely unstoppable (over 100 books still in print) L’Amour, still producing fluently from his grave (End of the Drive, 1997), offers one more gathering of unpublished tales, proving again that great writing laughs at death. Showing sheer contempt for slow openings, L’Amour’s seven newly discovered short stories offer some breath-catching first paragraphs echoing with the cold steel click of a Colt .45 hammer being cocked. The lead story, “The Man from Utah,” polishes L’Amour’s walnut prose to its glossiest grain. Bearing a fearsome reputation as a gunfighter, Marshall Utah Blaine arrives in Squaw Creek to investigate 14 recent murders (three were marshals) by a cunning bandit masquerading as an upright citizen. By a process of deduction, the shrewd Blaine narrows his suspects down until he has the killer. “Here Ends the Trail” opens with a High L’Amouresque Miltonic Inversion: “Cold was the night and bitter the wind and brutal the trail behind. Hunched in the saddle, I growled at the dark and peered through the blinding rain. The agony of my wound was a white-hot flame from the bullet of Korry Gleason.” This builds to an explosive climax that mixes vengeance with great-heartedness. “Battle at Burnt Camp,” “Ironwood Station” and “The Man from the Dead Hills” all live up to the melodrama of their blue-steel titles. “Strawhouse Trail” opens memorably with the line: “He looked through his field glasses into the eyes of a dying man.” And never lets up. The title novella tells of Lona Markham’s unwilling engagement to six-foot-five, 250-pound, harsh-lipped Frank Mailer, who has “blue, slightly glassy eyes.” Will Lance Kilkenny, the mysterious Black Rider, save her from indestructible Mailer? Stinging stories of powerful men against landscapes you can strike a match on.
Pub Date: May 11, 1998
ISBN: 0-553-10833-6
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
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