An engaging drama with a strong cast and a final surprise.
In this novel, the lives of two women briefly intersect at a bed-and-breakfast on Lake Arrowhead, where Cabin Five has held a secret for almost three decades.
Annie Parker, the primary narrator of Braun’s series opener, is a child when she; her older sister, Loni; and their parents begin spending summers at their Lake Arrowhead house in California. Annie loves the natural surroundings and quiet respite from busy Long Beach. Her parents sell the summer house when she is 16 years old, but as an adult, when a crisis develops in her marriage, she returns to the tranquility of Lake Arrowhead. She rents a small cabin at a B&B, where she hopes to sort out a new trajectory for her life. Although the bulk of the narrative belongs to Annie, there are short interludes narrated by Alyce Murphy, an only child who was born in 1934 and raised in Paramount, California. Despite her family’s financial struggles during the Depression and her father being drafted to serve in World War II, Alyce describes a relatively carefree early childhood. Everything changes in 1947, when her father’s lifeless body is discovered in a cabin at Lake Arrowhead (“That was the year my father left and never came home again”). It will take almost 30 years for her mother to reveal the grisly truth about her father’s death. Now, she visits the mountain retreat to search Cabin Five for any remnant of her father’s final day. Braun, who has a personal connection to Lake Arrowhead, skillfully uses the silent cabins as the vehicle for bringing together disparate characters, if only momentarily. The author writes that the next two installments of the trilogy, continuations of Annie’s story, will bring additional offspring of long-dead guests of the cabins back to the mountains to recapture pieces of their pasts. In this unpredictable volume, Annie is a likable and sturdy female lead gradually rebuilding her life professionally and romantically. And Alyce’s tale offers an engrossing, poignant subplot. Conversational prose filled with Lake Arrowhead atmospherics sets a comfortable pace, notwithstanding a few too many forays into the minute decorating details of Annie’s renovation projects.
An engaging drama with a strong cast and a final surprise.Pub Date: May 10, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64704-464-0
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Marble Creek Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
The mystery plot and the Italian idyl both play supporting roles in this fairy tale for grownups.
Scottoline’s latest links her great love of Italy with her long record of female-centered crime fiction.
Julia Pritzker has a presentiment that something terrible is around the corner, but she never imagines just how terrible: When her husband, Philadelphia attorney Mike Shallette, tries to protect her from a man who grabs her designer bag, he gets stabbed to death before her eyes. Julia’s grief becomes laced with guilt when she realizes that her daily horoscope had predicted a calamity she’s now convinced she could have prevented. The news from Italian attorney Massimiliano Lombardi that his late client has left her millions in cash and an estate worth nearly as much again doesn’t comfort her, but it does provide distraction—especially since she’s never heard of Emilia Rossi and has no idea why she’s been chosen as her heir. Since Julia, adopted at an early age by a couple who’ve been dead for years, wonders if Emilia might have been her biological grandmother, she travels to Chianti in hope of recovering some of Emilia’s DNA. Unfortunately, caretakers Anna Mattia Vesta and Piero Fano have burned all of Emilia’s clothing and personal items on her orders, so there’s nothing left to test. Growing convinced that the stars are directing her and that her history is rooted in Emilia’s decrepit house, Julia turns down repeated offers for the property and resolves to secure evidence confirming the relationship between Emilia and her. Now all she has to do is protect herself from the shadowy figures tracking and following her and recover from a series of vivid, hallucinatory nightmares that seem to be the cost of claiming her heritage.
The mystery plot and the Italian idyl both play supporting roles in this fairy tale for grownups.Pub Date: July 15, 2025
ISBN: 9781538769997
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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