A feisty, evanescent first novel, lively enough to keep a sunbather awake.
Well-fit, great-looking hotel employees in Nantucket prowl for love..
Everyone at the Nantucket Beach Club and Hotel this summer wants something, and wants it badly. The receptionist, Love, is so obsessed with getting pregnant that she sees each male guest as a potential sperm donor. Bill, who owns the place with his wife Therese, wants his 18-year-old daughter Cecily to agree to take over the hotel. But Cecily’s one desire is to fly to Rio for a reunion with her well-endowed Brazilian boyfriend. For Therese, concerned about Bill’s failing heart and dreading Cecily's impending independence, all would be well if only Cecily would marry Mack, the hotel's manager, who loves the Beach Club as if it were his own—though he has a long-term girlfriend, Maribel, who is desperate for him to propose. On top of all this, the head bellman, Vance, having lost the manager's job to Mack 12 years ago, has marked this as the summer when he'll finally take his revenge. At the center of all the turmoil, easygoing Mack simply wants everyone off his back while he decides whether to make the alluring island his home or return to his farm in Iowa. With Maribel pursuing Mack, Jem (another bellman) pursuing Maribel, Vance pursuing Love, and Love pursuing everyone, the club is awash with hormones, and quarrels break from one minute to the next. The ever-changing cast of hotel guests—a sexy suspected drug dealer, an extracurricular flame of Mack's, a generous dying man—adds to the mix. After a crescendo that begins with Vance taking Mack's decision into his own hands and culminates with a hurricane that leaves the hotel engulfed in sand, the characters find all their obsessive needs gone—carried off, as if by the wind—letting peace reign.
A feisty, evanescent first novel, lively enough to keep a sunbather awake.Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-26125-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2000
With her past couple of titles, Roberts (as opposed to her typically grittier moniker, J.D. Robb) is moving into more...
Bodine Longbow runs her family’s Montana resort with an unfailing can-do attitude, but nothing can prepare her or the family for the return of her long-lost—and brutalized—aunt or an unexpected rash of violence in the area.
Four generations of women have a hand in the Longbow family businesses, consisting of a ranch and a popular resort. Bodine loves her family's Montana legacy and working with her great-grandmother, grandmother, parents, and brothers. She’s getting used to having Callen Skinner, her teen crush, back in town, especially since he’s great with horses and she needs a new manager. Hiring Cal makes sense, though she’s a little worried about becoming his boss given their obvious mutual attraction. When two women are murdered in the area, suspicion falls on Cal thanks to a deputy sheriff who holds a grudge. Then Alice, an aunt who disappeared before Bodine was born, shows up with a chilling story of having been captured and held for 20-plus years by a violent psychopath. Bodine, Cal, and the family laser in on taking care of the fragile woman but wonder if the events could be connected. Questions mount and tensions ratchet even higher when Cal and his horse are shot at during a ride. Suddenly no one seems safe, and the Longbows circle the wagons, but will it be enough to save the family and their loved ones? Roberts always tells a good story that balances romance and suspense, but in this title, the narrative is deeper, the mystery is more layered, and with Alice, Roberts moves into another level of exploring physical and emotional trauma and the powerful balm of family and love.
With her past couple of titles, Roberts (as opposed to her typically grittier moniker, J.D. Robb) is moving into more complex and darker storytelling, to terrific effect.Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-12307-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
A dynamic start to a series with a refreshingly original premise.
After a horrible affair implodes her life, a young woman travels to North Carolina for an inheritance, meets a sexy firefighter and two half sisters she didn’t know she had, and decides it’s time for a life-changing move.
Avery Keller believed her mother’s claim that she didn’t know who Avery's father was. In truth, her father knew about her, which makes her feel unwanted and resentful when she finds out about it after he dies, despite the inheritance he leaves her. Traveling to Magnolia, North Carolina, to claim it, she meets her two half sisters, who also have tangled feelings toward their father. Her inheritance consists of some heavily mortgaged buildings in downtown Magnolia, so Avery stays in her sister Carrie’s apartment while the sisters decide how to handle the properties and Carrie cleans out her father’s mansion. The apartment’s landlord, Gray, is the sexy fireman she bickered with at a gas station on her way into town. Every day Avery lingers, she grows closer to Magnolia, her sisters, Gray, and his daughter, softening her determination to leave. She doesn’t have anywhere to go, anyway, since her successful life in San Francisco had been derailed by an affair with a deceitful married man. As her relationship with Gray grows emotionally and physically intimate, it threatens his narcissistic ex-wife just as he hopes to gain sole custody of his daughter. The first full-length novel (A Magnolia Reunion, 2019) in the Magnolia Sisters series introduces the daughters of a renowned artist whose star had faded, highlighting his complicated relationships with them and with his community. Major’s characters and small-town romance worldbuilding are unique, engaging, and emotionally compelling. Avery and Gray’s romance is complex, but the Magnolia backdrop adds dimension and texture to the story.
A dynamic start to a series with a refreshingly original premise.Pub Date: March 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-488-05664-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harlequin HQN
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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