A romance chock full of unexpected twists, turns, secrets, and spirits plus a healthy dose of redemptive love.
Soon after an African-American woman in Blink, Texas, buys a haunted house that was the scene of a murder 30 years ago, the handsome son of the victim shows up. Wildly attracted to each other, the two also sense that they’re instrumental to resolution for the restless ghosts.
Abby Rhodes loves the house she just bought and has loved it for years. She felt “like she’d belonged in it, and every time she’d walked away from it, she’d missed it.” A contractor, she plans to renovate but realizes there’s something weird going on. Her psychic friend, Marlowe, confirms that the house has spirits but says they like Abby. Then a stranger stops by, and the ghosts welcome him, too. The man is Jordan Tunson, adopted son and heir of Julian Gatewood, a “black man with balls big enough to jump into a white man’s game” and a murder victim in the house three decades earlier. Jordan has already grown Julian’s company immensely and is working on an astronomical opportunity. Not a good time to be drawn to the new owner or the secrets of the house where his father was murdered, but Jordan feels compelled. As Abby and Jordan fall in love and sort out how to help the agitated ghosts by digging into the past, Jordan's recent ex-lover, Robin, isn’t ready to give him up and will go to astounding lengths to keep him. Mason sets up a fascinating, multilayered storyline with a lot of moving parts that she keeps generally smooth, well-oiled, and nicely paced, though the end feels a bit rushed. Robin is slightly unhinged, and readers might ask the same questions she should—and Jordan does—about whether anyone should want a man so desperately when he doesn’t want you.
A romance chock full of unexpected twists, turns, secrets, and spirits plus a healthy dose of redemptive love.Pub Date: July 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-05226-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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