An unconventional but consistently absorbing multigenre tale.
In Bishop’s (Red-Line: Trust Destiny, 2015, etc.) mystery/thriller series starter with supernatural elements, a reporter helps a man who believes a curse has been killing his lovers.
Grayson Steele and his best friend, Cooper Stone, started a software company that made them millionaires. But Grayson, who rarely leaves his beachfront house on Sea Island, is miserable. Back in high school, one of his friends, Joanie, died from an apparent suicide. Her mother was so distraught that, at Joanie’s funeral, she wished the pain of losing a loved one on all her daughter’s friends. She pointed specifically at Grayson, who became certain that the woman had cursed him. Since then, every time he’s intimate with a woman whom he loves, she dies three days later. Gillian Fletcher is a reporter who hopes to write an article about the reclusive millionaire, and it soon becomes clear (to readers, at least) that she’s prodding Grayson for information on his deceased lovers. She has a theory that it’s not a curse that’s killing the women but a person, although she doesn’t know their motive. She makes an offer to Grayson to feign a sexual relationship with him in order to ensnare the killer. But Grayson soon learns that the reporter is harboring an incredible secret. Bishop’s novel is two books in one: a murder mystery, which reaches an early resolution, followed by a reveal about Gillian that results in a very different kind of story. Readers who’ve already read Bishop’s preceding trilogy will be in familiar terrain, but for others, it will be a somewhat jarring genre shift. Nevertheless, there’s romance and suspense throughout as Grayson and Gillian succumb to their mutual attraction and occasionally find themselves in mortal peril. Lengthy scenes play out with copious dialogue, but they entail engaging discussions about murder suspects or the particulars of Gillian’s family. During action scenes, however, the author truly delivers; in one tension-ridden sequence, Gillian hides from a threat, “her breathing coming in short shallow gasps. Her heart hammered and her side burned from exertion.”
An unconventional but consistently absorbing multigenre tale.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-77840-1
Page Count: 402
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2019
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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