A solid, sexy thriller that should appeal to romance and crime-drama fans alike.
A debut novel mixes elements of mystery and romance to tell the story of a detective who must stay focused on her work in the heat of a passionate and unexpected encounter.
Isabelle “Isa” Carte is an ambitious and steel-nerved career woman, as the reader learns from the very beginning when she reacts with indifference to her long-term boyfriend leaving her for another woman. She is too preoccupied with her job as a detective to have time for romance. But when the body of her ex-boyfriend’s new lover is found in the river in Winnipeg, with Isabelle’s name written in lipstick on her forehead, she cannot deny that she is deeply disturbed. Encouraged by her work partner, Hank Curtis, she decides to hide out with her German shepherd, Jack, in her family’s lakeside cabin in rural Ontario for one week. Frustrated that she cannot play an active part in the investigation, her attention is soon diverted when she meets a rugged mountain man named Alec Reed. She’s initially suspicious of the handsome stranger (“She should try to figure out who Alec Reed was and what he was all about, if nothing else, to rule him out as a suspect....For her own safety, she should probably learn more about who he was and why he was here”). When a passionate relationship between them unfolds as quickly as her stalker continues to kill, Isa is torn between her work and her newfound love. The fiery combination of zealous romance and thrilling crime mystery makes the novel an absorbing and fast-paced read. Told in the third-person omniscient, the story flits among the perspectives of Isa, her new lover, and the killer. But as gripping as the murder mystery plotline is, so is the tragic family history of Alec, which is revealed to the reader long before he tells Isa. The author often uses the appropriate analogy of a storm to describe her protagonist’s unrelenting tumult: “nature seemed to be cleansed after yesterday’s storm…so much peace and beauty around Isa, but so much turmoil going on within her.” In addition to the rounded character development, there are moments of pure, uncensored sensuality that should give fans of romance and erotica welcome goose bumps. But the subsequent conclusion to the investigation will likely leave readers disappointed.
A solid, sexy thriller that should appeal to romance and crime-drama fans alike.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4602-7661-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2016
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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