HENRY’S LIST OF WRONGS

Red-hot screenwriter (one movie out, one in the can, six more in production) Shepherd takes a breather to bring out a first novel, a tale of redemption and romance about a Wall Street man of steel who crumbles mid-deal when his entire reason for being evaporates.

Known on the Street and beyond as The Assassin, Henry Chase was actually a mild-mannered, going-nowhere teenager in nowhere Kansas until his unlikely prom date, the beautiful, going-somewhere Elizabeth, first seduces him and then tells him she can’t see him anymore because he’s a loser. Cut to the quick, Henry proves her wrong by leaving Kansas and making it big in New York, but when he returns ten years later to acquire the hotel owned by his chief rival for her affections, he learns that Elizabeth really dumped him because she knew she was going to die young of a heart defect. About to throw himself out a window of the hotel in despair, Henry is stopped by a wise-cracking housekeeper Sophie, who turns out to be a psychology grad student with a plan that will make Henry whole again. His List of Wrongs, prepared with Sophie’s help, names those whose lives Henry destroyed on his way to the top, and he and Sophie cross the country to face each of them so that Henry can beg forgiveness. The first of Henry’s former victims slugs him in the face; the second pulls out a gun and pretends to shoot him at point-blank range; the third drops a Bloody Mary (glass and all) on his head from a second-floor window; the fourth, a man twice Henry’s age, beats him savagely in a squash match. But somehow every one of them forgives him, and Henry has the added blessing of falling in love with Sophie, who stands by him through it all. Unfortunately, as he learns when he goes back to Kansas to right the final wrong, Sophie is not quite what she seems: she’s really an escapee from a mental hospital and a convicted murderer.

Smooth as silk, there’s no reason to think that this charming, sweet story will fail to find an audience ready and willing to lap it up.