From bestselling author Sally Beauman (Dark Angel, 1990; Destiny, 1987) comes this taut, smartly paced romantic thriller set in present-day London. Just after New Year's Day, a beautiful and exquisitely dressed young woman enters the main London office of Intercontinental Deliveries carrying four small parcels. The receptionist logs them in, preparing to send them to their various destinations in Paris, Venice, New York, and London. What the receptionist doesn't know is that each of these boxes contain's a pair of handcuffs and a woman's glove—a long black leather glove that smells strangely from some foul and feral substance. Within hours, two of the recipients—Pascal Lamartine, a Paris-based photographer, and Gini Hunter, a London-based reporter—are called to the editorial offices of Gini's newspaper and assigned to work on a sex-scandal story that concerns John Hawthorne, the handsome, charismatic American ambassador to Great Britain. Neither Gini nor Pascal immediately connects the strange packages with the assignment. They are too busy trying to gather clues about Hawthorne, a presidential hopeful with a ravishing wife named Lise, and trying to deal with the aftermath of their own short-lived but passionate affair in Beirut 12 years earlier. It seems that Hawthorne's fairy-tale marriage has begun to crumble: There are rumors of beautiful blonde call girls wearing long black gloves, secret trysts, violence. When Gini and Pascal learn of the gloves, they begin to connect the pieces and find themselves implicated in a dark, treacherous plot that involves sexual perversion, corruption, and murder. But this is only the beginning: As they continue to probe, they find that the story stretches farther back than they dreamed, to a tiny Vietnamese village called My Nuc, where unspeakable atrocities occurred. Beauman has written a sexy, nail-biting, page-turning thriller nicely spiced with just the right amounts of love and death. The erotic charge between Gini and Pascal—first denied, then succumbed to—is palpable and convincing, as is the compelling and morally ambiguous figure of John Hawthorne. (Book-of-the-Month dual selection for May)
Pub Date: May 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-449-90880-1
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1994
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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