A delicious blend of romance and thriller that goes down smoothly.
An amoral grifter chooses the wrong person to victimize in this novel told from multiple viewpoints.
The titular character in this third book by O’Sullivan (The Patsy, 2018, etc.) is Olive Fairbanks. Olive, 26, is an intelligent, attractive wannabe writer who is tending bar to pay the bills in Los Angeles. She has always been unlucky in love until handsome Austin Jenkins walks into her bar, The Belly Flop. The chiseled Southerner sweeps Olive off her feet. Austin seems too good to be true, and he is. Con artist Becca Poe is blackmailing Austin with a video from high school. Her plan is to have Austin trick Olive to get inside the mansion of Barry Gant, the bar owner who has long been infatuated with the bartender. Becca has learned that Barry keeps hundreds of thousands of dollars in his home safe. This home invasion would be under the pretense of Austin wanting to open a bar and seeking Barry’s advice. Becca’s scheme works flawlessly. Her thuggish accomplice, Chet Watkins, knocks out Olive and kills Barry. Then Becca shoots Austin and Chet. She steals more than $600,000 but leaves behind $75,000 to fool investigators into thinking that the robbers, Olive, and Barry killed one another. Her big mistake is that Olive, who Becca thought was dying, survives Chet’s attack, and the bartender wants to discover the truth. O’Sullivan has created a winning protagonist in Olive, who grew up as a Nancy Drew fan and is determined to figure out how she was used in this scheme that left Barry dead. “Bad seed” Becca proves Olive’s ideal foil. Spineless Austin is caught in the middle, falling for Olive but doomed as Becca’s pawn. Employing multiple voices is O’Sullivan’s very effective narrative device in this engrossing tale. These include not only the three main characters, but also Richard, the desperate detective whom Olive hires to help her track down Becca. Having each describe the action helps readers better understand the players. Let’s hope the author brings back intriguing bartender/detective Olive for another case.
A delicious blend of romance and thriller that goes down smoothly.Pub Date: June 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9992956-3-2
Page Count: 279
Publisher: Big B Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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
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