Sufficient mystery nearly overshadowed by stellar character subplots and a sweet but realistic father-daughter reunion.
A Phoenix PI and the teenage daughter he just learned he had find themselves embroiled in deception, murder, and human trafficking in Lewis’ debut thriller.
The latest drunken rant from Enid Iglowski’s mom comes with a shock: Enid’s father isn’t really her father. Enid tracks down her biological dad, Jack Fox, a private eye working in Arizona. Jack had no idea Enid existed, and he doesn’t know what to do with her. Plus, he’s already got enough on his plate: Jeni Hargrove hires him to find her real mother, while her wealthy sister Eve pays Jack to drop Jeni’s case. Detective Bud Orlean, meanwhile, may have a break in Daniel Hargrove’s presumed murder. Daniel, the sisters’ stepfather, has been missing for over three years; someone mailed a few body parts, including a heart, to the cops, but police have found what could be the rest of him. As Jack starts a dangerous relationship with Eve, he wonders why another private eye is following him—and who’s behind another, more recent murder. Despite Jack’s job, the murder investigation takes a back seat to an elaborate, albeit continually fascinating, soap opera. There are shades of a detective story: dark family secrets, more than one femme fatale, and Enid’s going undercover at a home for wayward girls to get some dirt on the Hargroves. But drama abounds, overwhelmingly so: Bud’s wife, Bunnie, threatens to divorce him if he won’t retire, and son Chip drops out of med school to become a writer; Petunia, with whom Jack had an affair, doesn’t seem to want to leave him alone; and Enid is terrified that Jack will hate her, but the stubborn girl doesn’t make liking her very easy. Rather than identifying a killer(s), the story eventually becomes more about who’s having (or wants to have) sex with whom. Enid is initially exasperating—she’s not above tantrums or milking others for sympathy since she was the result of a one-night stand—but she’ll grow on readers. Meanwhile, the banter and heated arguments between Jack and Enid are typically funny, almost endearing. She clearly wants a father, and his care for her is unmistakable. Lewis also drops in a few surprising turns both for the murders and the intermingling soap-operatic stories.
Sufficient mystery nearly overshadowed by stellar character subplots and a sweet but realistic father-daughter reunion.Pub Date: July 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-0990610809
Page Count: 384
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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