An interesting look at town politics on Martha’s Vineyard, but the characters are hard to root for.
A woman returns to her childhood home on Martha’s Vineyard and soon finds herself embroiled in local drama.
Joanna Howes grew up on Martha’s Vineyard but left to become a journalist in New York City. When her uncle, Hank, injures himself, she returns to the Vineyard to care for him. She plans on only staying in town for a short while before returning to her big-city life, job, and boyfriend, but it turns out Hank’s recovery time is longer than she predicted. He isn’t supposed to put weight on his broken leg, so he needs someone to do pretty much everything around his house—and that someone is Joanna. Joanna takes a freelance job at a local newspaper, but the pay isn’t quite enough to cover her expenses, so she starts writing for a competing paper under another name. The problem? The papers are locked in a bitter rivalry, meaning she has to keep each job a secret from the other. This is hard to do on an island where she grew up and knows just about everyone. When wealthy seasonal resident Orion Smith sues the zoning board for the right to land a helicopter on his property, it’s big news that Joanna must cover for both papers. But, of course, yet another problem presents itself: Joanna falls for the wealthy helicopter owner. He doesn’t know about her secret writing identity, and he also doesn’t know that Joanna’s Uncle Hank is on the zoning board. Galland (Stepdog, 2015, etc.) writes lush and convincing descriptions of life on Martha’s Vineyard in the off-season, and her writing brings to life the struggle between the year-rounders and the summer people. However, the drama of Joanna’s duplicity is never as intense as Joanna acts like it is—very few people who discover her secret even care that she has two jobs. Much more conflict is present in Joanna’s relationship with Orion, who’s presented as a charmer. However, he often comes off as a bully, particularly when he discovers that Joanna’s uncle is on the board he’s suing. He threatens her livelihood, insults her with multiple expletives, and never fully apologizes; yet Joanna and, presumably, the reader are supposed to look past his behavior because he had a difficult upbringing.
An interesting look at town politics on Martha’s Vineyard, but the characters are hard to root for.Pub Date: Dec. 31, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-267285-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
Though Roberts (The Reef, 1998, etc.) never writes badly, her newest mystery romance is more inconsistent than most. Little Olivia MacBride, daughter of two golden Hollywood superstars, wakes up one night to see her coked-up father holding her mother’s bloody body, a scissors in his hand. After her dad is led off to prison, Liv is sent to live with her grandparents, who run a successful lodge in the Olympic rain forest on the Washington coast—a location far across the continent from the Maryland shores of Roberts’s Quinn trilogy, but one that allows her to explore another place of life-giving scenic wonder. And when Liv grows up and becomes a naturalist/guide, she gets to take us on lots of eye-dazzling tours. Into her sheltered paradise comes Noah Brady, the son of the police detective who arrested Liv’s father and has been her friend since childhood. Noah has grown up to be a bestselling true-crime writer, and, against Liv’s will, he wants to write his next book about the MacBride murder case. (Liv’s dad, about to be released from San Quentin, is dying of brain cancer.) Though Liv fights her attraction to Noah, he’s a persistent boy, and on an extended and very sexy camping trip, the two become lovers. Meanwhile, the real murderer, whose identity will probably be obvious to most readers, leaves his own trail of violence up to Washington and a final prime-evil shoot-out. Added to Roberts’s poorly drawn mystery and her interlude of swell lusty love is her usual theme of how wounded children and inner children are healed and nurtured by good nuclear families. If the conventional wisdom is true, that romance readers never tire of reruns of the same old same old, then Roberts won’t have disappointed them.
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-399-14470-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999
An entertaining page-turner.
Terri Rayburn is devastated that her perfect man belongs to someone else, but once Nate Taggert realizes that Terri's the one for him, her complicated past still stands in the way of their being together.
Terri is attracted to Nate the moment she lays eyes on him, and soon they fall into an easy partnership at the Virginia lake resort she runs with her father. Nate is upfront about being engaged to the mayor’s daughter, Stacy, but she’s in Europe for a few weeks, and it quickly becomes clear to Terri that Nate and Stacy aren’t a great match. However, Terri, whose mother left when she was 2, has always had a problematic relationship with the citizens of Summer Hill. Since Leslie disappeared, the town gossip has made sure everyone remembers her as a promiscuous vixen, a label which tainted Terri as she got older and made her look like a problem when, as Nate begins to understand, she was really a victim. It’s clear to everyone around them that they are falling in love, but even as Nate realizes it himself, Terri is adamant that they can’t be together. She won’t steal him from the popular Stacy because it would mean she’d never be able to live in Summer Hill, and she won’t abandon her father. Deveraux spins an intriguing and unorthodox romance, continuing her Summer Hill branch of the Taggert/Montgomery series with two characters who have some unique, interesting obstacles in their paths and navigate through them with secrets uncovered and old wounds healed. The story is well plotted, though Nate is unnecessarily oblivious sometimes and the book takes an unexpected swing into romantic suspense territory in the last quarter. The solved mystery resolves Nate and Terri’s conflict, though the villain’s motivations seem a little cartoonish.
An entertaining page-turner.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7783-5124-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harlequin MIRA
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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