A gripping tale with a distinctive couple.
Married life for an American woman and a Saudi prince is shaken by the resurgence of dubious individuals from their respective pasts in Canfield’s (Only Love Twice, 2013) thriller.
Newlyweds Saleem and Madison Kelly Al Abdullah have settled in Knoxville, Tennessee. Several months into their marriage, Saleem hears Sonja Popuolov is looking for him. She’s the 20-something daughter of Sophia, with whom Saleem had an affair years ago. Though he’s always questioned Sophia’s claim that Sonja is his daughter, Saleem has been financially supporting Sonja. To finally verify or debunk their blood relation, Saleem and Sonja agree to meet in Florida, where the Al Abdullahs are planning to buy a winter home. It’s also where Madison worked as a cop before hanging up her badge. Those skills prove essential at Miami International Airport, where Madison spots a car following them. Sure enough, someone has been tracking Sonja since she looked into DNA testing with Saleem. Madison gets help from old police contacts and soon learns the Russian Mafia may be targeting Sonja. But the surprise involvement of an abusive person from Madison’s past may put her in danger as well. Though the novel’s first half is unhurried, a later kidnapping amplifies the suspense. Canfield establishes her protagonists well; their meet-cute formed the plot of her preceding tale. Romantic interludes between the two are convincing and solidify the tension once the initially faceless menace enters the story. Eventual perspective from said villains adds excitement, especially when it seems two independent baddies have identical agendas. Extensive backstory adequately, and sometimes repetitively, explains all that’s unfolding in the present day. For example, Saleem recites details of yesteryear with Sophia on multiple occasions. Some recurrence, however, proves beneficial, like the running gag of Saleem and Madison’s attempts at intimacy, which others repeatedly interrupt.
A gripping tale with a distinctive couple.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-63135-481-6
Page Count: 210
Publisher: Strategic Book Publishing & Rights Agency, LLC
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Thoroughbreds and Virginia blue-bloods cavort, commit murder, and fall in love in Roberts's (Hidden Riches, 1994, etc.) latest romantic thriller — this one set in the world of championship horse racing. Rich, sheltered Kelsey Byden is recovering from a recent divorce when she receives a letter from her mother, Naomi, a woman she has believed dead for over 20 years. When Kelsey confronts her genteel English professor father, though, he sheepishly confesses that, no, her mother isn't dead; throughout Kelsey's childhood, she was doing time for the murder of her lover. Kelsey meets with Naomi and not only finds her quite charming, but the owner of Three Willows, one of the most splendid horse farms in Virginia. Kelsey is further intrigued when she meets Gabe Slater, a blue-eyed gambling man who owns a neighboring horse farm; when one of Gabe's horses is mated with Naomi's, nostrils flare, flanks quiver, and the romance is on. Since both Naomi and Gabe have horses entered in the Kentucky Derby, Kelsey is soon swept into the whirlwind of the Triple Crown, in spite of her family's objections to her reconciliation with the notorious Naomi. The rivalry between the two horse farms remains friendly, but other competitors — one of them is Gabe's father, a vicious alcoholic who resents his son's success — prove less scrupulous. Bodies, horse and human, start piling up, just as Kelsey decides to investigate the murky details of her mother's crime. Is it possible she was framed? The ground is thick with no-goods, including haughty patricians, disgruntled grooms, and jockeys with tragic pasts, but despite all the distractions, the identity of the true culprit behind the mayhem — past and present — remains fairly obvious. The plot lopes rather than races to the finish. Gambling metaphors abound, and sexual doings have a distinctly equine tone. But Roberts's style has a fresh, contemporary snap that gets the story past its own worst excesses.
Pub Date: June 13, 1995
ISBN: 0-399-14059-X
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
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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