Tilly is great at writing suspense and creating strong heroines, but her book deserved a better ending.
Mary, the mysterious character from Hidden Cove (2019), the third volume of Tilly's Solace Island series, unmasks herself as Sarah Rainsford, a wealthy heiress running away from her violent, abusive husband.
Sarah and her cat, Charlie, are on the run and stuck in Los Angeles with no money. Sarah's parents were killed in a car crash. In their will, they left her hundreds of millions of dollars sewed up in a trust her brutal husband, Kevin, cannot touch. In a black rage, he beats pregnant Sarah until she begins to hemorrhage and loses her baby. Because of a fairly unbelievable complication, Sarah can't get a divorce because she has no personal papers to prove her identity. Her old family lawyer, the increasingly pernicious Phillip, has never sent her the documents she needs. Four years later, Kevin is viciously pursuing her, hoping to take Sarah alive and submissive. Sarah's a survivor. Using a fake ID, dyeing her hair, and calling herself Rachel Jones, she's hired as a live-in personal assistant to Mick Talford, a famous young Hollywood director and notorious hell-raiser living in an exclusive LA canyon mansion. Tilly, a Golden Globe–winning actress, has firmly established herself as a romance writer, and though she's been away from the Hollywood scene for a long time, she clearly knows the territory. Mick might be living the dream, but he grew up with his grandmother, a madam who ran a brothel in the Nevada desert. And he knows that Sarah, who is clearly a class act from the East Coast, is in trouble. He also starts to enjoy having someone around. But one day, while Sarah is out getting the fixings for apple pie, she sees police officers checking out her license plate, and she knows that Kevin, also a cop, has found her. Mick gains Sarah's trust, and the pair set off to repair her life as Kevin the villain, who has now drowned a friend of Mick's, pursues them. Tilly has a skillful way of interweaving a suspenseful thriller with the growing love that Sarah and Mick have for each other. But even with a plot twist at the end, the happily-ever-after is trite and contrived.
Tilly is great at writing suspense and creating strong heroines, but her book deserved a better ending.Pub Date: July 27, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-20108-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A romance that could have used significant rethinking.
Childhood friends, almost-sweethearts, a misunderstanding, and a funeral.
Blair Lang and Declan Renshaw were best friends who went on one date before a disagreement and an accident sent them in different directions after high school. Now Blair is back from college to be with her great-aunt Lottie, who’s dying, and to support her single mother in small-town Seabrook, California. Finding a job at a coffee shop puts her in the path of her former boyfriend, since he turns out to be its owner. Can the two get past their mistakes? The novel uses the popular second-chance romance trope, but Pham fails to energize it through interesting characters. Blair’s grief over her great-aunt’s death and her plan to help her mother are overshadowed by internal monologues about her feelings, the way her friends aren’t paying attention to her, and the novel she plans to write. Declan’s distinguishing characteristic, besides being a former high school quarterback, is his skill at building birdhouses. Unsurprisingly, the couple doesn’t have much chemistry; when they embrace, their “bodies meld like…memory foam.” The wooden characters, unusual word choices (“conglomerate of pedestrians,” “litany of plants”), and odd turns of phrase (“tension melting from his eyebrows like butter melting in a warm pan”) are almost enough to obscure the lack of plot development. What passes for stakes is easily defused when Blair comes into an inheritance that saves her from working as a consultant at Ernst & Young in New York—so she can write a romance novel.
A romance that could have used significant rethinking.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781668095188
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
A heartfelt look at taking second chances, in life and in love.
Two struggling authors spend the summer writing and falling in love in a quaint beach town.
January Andrews has just arrived in the small town of North Bear Shores with some serious baggage. Her father has been dead for a year, but she still hasn’t come to terms with what she found out at his funeral—he had been cheating on her mother for years. January plans to spend the summer cleaning out and selling the house her father and “That Woman” lived in together. But she’s also a down-on-her-luck author facing writer’s block, and she no longer believes in the happily-ever-after she’s made the benchmark of her work. Her steadily dwindling bank account, though, is a daily reminder that she must sell her next book, and fast. Serendipitously, she discovers that her new next-door neighbor is Augustus Everett, the darling of the literary fiction set and her former college rival/crush. Gus also happens to be struggling with his next book (and some serious trauma that unfolds throughout the novel). Though the two get off to a rocky start, they soon make a bet: Gus will try to write a romance novel, and January will attempt “bleak literary fiction.” They spend the summer teaching each other the art of their own genres—January takes Gus on a romantic outing to the local carnival; Gus takes January to the burned-down remains of a former cult—and they both process their own grief, loss, and trauma through this experiment. There are more than enough steamy scenes to sustain the slow-burn romance, and smart commentary on the placement and purpose of “women’s fiction” joins with crucial conversations about mental health to add multiple intriguing layers to the plot.
A heartfelt look at taking second chances, in life and in love.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0673-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Jove/Penguin
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
BOOK TO SCREEN
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
