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
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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