A fast-paced and engaging historical and romantic fantasy with strong protagonists.
A 17th-century Scottish highlander finds romance and intrigue after traveling to present-day Las Vegas.
In February 1692, the hospitality of Braeden MacDonald’s clan, the MacDonalds of Glencoe, is betrayed by a man named Robert Campbell. Braeden’s grandmother hands him a pocket watch and tells him to think of his mother and wish to travel to the meadows. After wishing on the watch, Braeden finds himself in an unfamiliar place. He is greeted by Tessa McTavish, who believes he is interviewing for a security job at her family’s Albannach Resort Hotel and Casino. She takes him to her father, John, who tells him he is in Las Vegas in the year 2016. John knows about the watch and offers to help him in exchange for protecting Tessa. John doesn’t trust Tessa’s fiance, Danny Madden. Despite her misgivings, Tessa is attracted to the ruggedly handsome Braeden and the feeling is mutual. It soon becomes apparent that John’s concerns are justified. When Danny mysteriously dies after breaking off the engagement and an employee disappears after witnessing a theft, Tessa and Braeden begin to suspect the connection is the ancestor of an enemy from Braeden’s past. Vale’s (A Turn in Time, 2015, etc.) latest novel is an enjoyable romantic fantasy highlighted by likable protagonists and clever flourishes of magic and historical detail. The brief but effective opening chapter sets the stage for the Glencoe Massacre and Braeden’s grandmother’s urgent effort to save him by giving him the watch. The contrast between Braeden’s 17th-century Scotland and Tessa’s 21st-century Las Vegas is striking, and Vale captures the humor in the highlander’s attempts to navigate his new surroundings, from riding in an elevator to dining in a fine restaurant. Tessa is a strong and resourceful romantic foil for Braeden. Their relationship unfolds gradually as she struggles with a fiance whose intentions seem insincere. The leads are bolstered by a strong supporting cast of characters, including Niall Campbell, a charismatic magician who seems to know a lot about Braeden’s clan and the watch.
A fast-paced and engaging historical and romantic fantasy with strong protagonists.Pub Date: June 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9970064-5-2
Page Count: 178
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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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