A humdrum novel of second-chance romance.
In Banton’s (Get Out of Town, 2014, etc.) love story, a middle-aged woman gets an unexpected second chance with her high school sweetheart in the Turks and Caicos Islands.
Photojournalist Jenny Keen agrees to help her fiance, William, the resident manager of The Inn on Grace Bay Beach, by taking photos for an upcoming feature about the resort in National Geographic Traveller. Camdyn, the woman hired to write the article, brings along her husband, Mark Merritt, who happens to be Jenny’s ex-high school boyfriend. Thrust together after more than two decades apart, it’s apparent that they never stopped loving each other. But Jenny has a secret that she isn’t sure how to tell him—and neither of them wants to rekindle their romance if it means hurting others. In between shoots and island tours, the two resolve to find a way to be together, even after the hard-to-tie-down Jenny leaves for another assignment in Haiti. Lucky for them, the conceited Camdyn and ruthless William hit it off, paving the way for the old lovers to reconnect. But later, Camdyn mysteriously goes missing from her Indiana home. The novel paints a luscious island scene that will leave readers with the urge to book tickets to the Caribbean. Unfortunately, the backdrop often outshines the story, and the intrigue often comes off as trite or overly dramatic. For example, Jenny obsesses for pages about the unknown past of Hope, a hotel employee’s wife. Mark finally asks about it and relays the information to Jenny, who fawns over how he “skillfully unraveled the puzzle”—but despite the buildup, the storyline ultimately falls flat. A conspiracy to burn down a historic building is similarly resolved halfheartedly. Part of the problem is that, just like a holiday at the titular idealistic resort, the novel has none of real life’s complications; few characters are forced to make tough decisions and everything conveniently works out. Day after day of sun, sand, and room service makes for a great vacation, but a rather boring book.
A humdrum novel of second-chance romance.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 121
Publisher: Pebble Bay Publishers
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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