Karasyov’s quartet of bratty heroines sorely lack likeability.
From Karasyov (Wolves in Chic Clothing, with Jill Kargman, 2005, etc.), a chatty novel about women who cheat.
As the sun rises over Pacific Palisades, a certain sameness pervades over the privileged residents—oh, the bore of school runs and salon days, the difficulty of squeezing in Pilates with the obligatory L.A. cocktail party. Four friends in their mid-30s are in a rut and agree to Victoria’s grand scheme for improving their lives: Each is giving herself a year to have an extramarital affair. Ironically, only Victoria’s husband is jerk enough to deserve the title of cuckold—all the others are nice enough guys. New-Agey Helen is married to Wesley, a mild-mannered British director who is too restrained for her. Preppy Bostonian Leelee is married to Brad, whose grave sin was to have lost his fortune in the dot.com bust, forcing Leelee to live an upper-middle-class life in a Palisades cottage while her friends inhabit mansions. Eliza loves Declan, but feels somehow underappreciated, and anyway, she’s always had a crush on movie star Tyler Trask (she’s a celebrity reporter with potential access to the heartthrob). It takes just a short conversation for Victoria to convince her friends to cheat (though why they all have to do it together is a bit unclear) and soon each lady is engaged in some extracurricular fun, husband and kids be damned. Bitchy Victoria is quickly in over her head—she’s chosen her husband’s business rival, a sadist threatening exposure if she tries to break it off. Eliza, meanwhile, is conflicted, not wanting to jeopardize her marriage, and spacey Helen wonders why she’s unfulfilled by her afternoon trysts. Only Leelee seems genuinely happy now that she’s hooked up with Jack, the man she’s been in love with since she was a teen. The affairs risk exposure at the hands of Anson Larrabee, local gossip columnist and blackmailer, ready to betray the women if he doesn’t get what he wants. But then he turns up dead.
Karasyov’s quartet of bratty heroines sorely lack likeability.Pub Date: June 26, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-7679-2690-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Though Roberts (The Reef, 1998, etc.) never writes badly, her newest mystery romance is more inconsistent than most. Little Olivia MacBride, daughter of two golden Hollywood superstars, wakes up one night to see her coked-up father holding her mother’s bloody body, a scissors in his hand. After her dad is led off to prison, Liv is sent to live with her grandparents, who run a successful lodge in the Olympic rain forest on the Washington coast—a location far across the continent from the Maryland shores of Roberts’s Quinn trilogy, but one that allows her to explore another place of life-giving scenic wonder. And when Liv grows up and becomes a naturalist/guide, she gets to take us on lots of eye-dazzling tours. Into her sheltered paradise comes Noah Brady, the son of the police detective who arrested Liv’s father and has been her friend since childhood. Noah has grown up to be a bestselling true-crime writer, and, against Liv’s will, he wants to write his next book about the MacBride murder case. (Liv’s dad, about to be released from San Quentin, is dying of brain cancer.) Though Liv fights her attraction to Noah, he’s a persistent boy, and on an extended and very sexy camping trip, the two become lovers. Meanwhile, the real murderer, whose identity will probably be obvious to most readers, leaves his own trail of violence up to Washington and a final prime-evil shoot-out. Added to Roberts’s poorly drawn mystery and her interlude of swell lusty love is her usual theme of how wounded children and inner children are healed and nurtured by good nuclear families. If the conventional wisdom is true, that romance readers never tire of reruns of the same old same old, then Roberts won’t have disappointed them.
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-399-14470-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999
An entertaining page-turner.
Terri Rayburn is devastated that her perfect man belongs to someone else, but once Nate Taggert realizes that Terri's the one for him, her complicated past still stands in the way of their being together.
Terri is attracted to Nate the moment she lays eyes on him, and soon they fall into an easy partnership at the Virginia lake resort she runs with her father. Nate is upfront about being engaged to the mayor’s daughter, Stacy, but she’s in Europe for a few weeks, and it quickly becomes clear to Terri that Nate and Stacy aren’t a great match. However, Terri, whose mother left when she was 2, has always had a problematic relationship with the citizens of Summer Hill. Since Leslie disappeared, the town gossip has made sure everyone remembers her as a promiscuous vixen, a label which tainted Terri as she got older and made her look like a problem when, as Nate begins to understand, she was really a victim. It’s clear to everyone around them that they are falling in love, but even as Nate realizes it himself, Terri is adamant that they can’t be together. She won’t steal him from the popular Stacy because it would mean she’d never be able to live in Summer Hill, and she won’t abandon her father. Deveraux spins an intriguing and unorthodox romance, continuing her Summer Hill branch of the Taggert/Montgomery series with two characters who have some unique, interesting obstacles in their paths and navigate through them with secrets uncovered and old wounds healed. The story is well plotted, though Nate is unnecessarily oblivious sometimes and the book takes an unexpected swing into romantic suspense territory in the last quarter. The solved mystery resolves Nate and Terri’s conflict, though the villain’s motivations seem a little cartoonish.
An entertaining page-turner.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7783-5124-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harlequin MIRA
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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