A sexy suspense novel despite some loose plot threads.
A traumatized Toronto heiress experiences new dangers and first love with a mysterious, covert operative in this debut romantic thriller.
In a prologue, Maddison Brooks muses upon being held captive seven years ago, after she startled a burglar who was likely after her green diamond Fabergé egg. After a shadowy figure freed her, she was put under psychiatric care by her rich Toronto businessman father and has since been plagued by visions that cause bleeding wounds on her body. In the present day, 22-year-old Maddison is on her way to meet her visiting older sister at a Toronto restaurant. Matthew Stoke, who’s getting ready for a covert assignment, spots Maddison, is struck by her beauty, and is shocked to learn her identity as the woman he once rescued. The couple has a brief yet powerful encounter, and Maddison is dazzled by his “money green” eyes. That night, she awakens to find Matthew in her house, and he saves her from arriving murderous thugs. He brings her to his home, where he witnesses one of her bleeding episodes. She loses her virginity to him, and the couple enjoys multiple bouts of mind-blowing sex. They also investigate the thugs, although Maddison chafes under Matthew’s protection, which includes security teams and surveillance. A blowout birthday party for Maddison’s father at the Metropolitan Museum of Art becomes the setting for a final, violent showdown. Author Brade turns up the heat in this first installment of a planned series, which includes many racy descriptions of the leading couple’s sexual fireworks, such as spanking and other love play (“He spanked me again, softer than before, but this time hungrier, his intensity stronger”). However, the book doesn’t fully explain the mystery of the missing egg, which takes a back seat to the romantic interludes, although the author may intend to connect the dots further in a follow-up. Overall, though, this is a rollicking, intriguing start.
A sexy suspense novel despite some loose plot threads.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9934306-0-2
Page Count: 446
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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