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THE LOCKET by Richard Paul Evans

THE LOCKET

by Richard Paul Evans

Pub Date: Oct. 13th, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-83473-1
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

For his fourth time out, the earnest and best-selling Evans moves on from the families he’s written about previously (The Christmas Box, 1995; The Letter, 1997, etc.), offering a change of names but not of plot, place, or his own trademark cartoon melodrama. Michael Keddington, poor in material things but rich in his knowledge of right and wrong, dropped out of college to nurse his mother (alcoholic Dad is dead, gone, and not regretted) through a six-month decline due to cancer. Now she’s in her grave, Michael is left alone with many debts, and he goes to work on them by taking a job at the Arcadia nursing home, a job that pays little but is rich in other rewards’such as the friendship it brings him with one of its residents, the wise Esther Huish, who gradually reveals to Michael her long-held secret of a love she was afraid to accept when a young woman and was to regret losing ever after. Her advice is especially helpful to Michael in his own—hyper-platonic, seemingly—love with Faye Murrow. Faye is about to go east from Utah for medical school and very much wants a betrothal from Michael before she does. Two problems, though: her neurosurgeon father forbids it, despising the wrong-side-of-the-tracks Michael as far beneath his brilliant daughter; and Michael himself is fairly sure—but you—re wrong, Michael, wrong!—that he’s not good enough, either. Whether or not true love conquers all will depend not only on Bad Dad, Good Faye, and Good-yet- Uncertain Michael, but also on the influence of wise Esther Huish’s long-kept secret—and on the outcome of a nasty court trial whose ludicrous origins lie in purest villainy. The Evans faithful, though, will be gripped to the bittersweet end, unlikely, as usual, to be deterred or dismayed by their author’s remarkable bumblings with his high-school English: —. . . and my mind reeled in as many directions as the slush that spun from my tires.— The reader can only concur. (Author tour)