A guilty pleasure just dying to be read on a Rio beach during Carnival.
A marriage of convenience between an American woman on the run from her past and a Brazilian cop out for justice gets complicated in this hothouse thriller.
Newlyweds Rosalinda and Gilberto da Costa have secrets. Her name is actually Linda Rose Armbrust. She met Gilberto, a cop, in a Denver pawnshop, where she was trying to cash in on her grandmother’s ring. Gilberto, way out of his Brazil jurisdiction, came to her rescue after she killed a man who was unfortunately the “worthless son of some Rocky Mountain crime boss.” Gilberto gallantly disposed of the victim and, initially more out of lust than love, proposed they marry and live together in Belo Horizonte in Brazil. Gilberto did not tell Roz that he was previously married to a woman who was brutally murdered and that the baby she was carrying was cut out of her and is still missing. Now, Roz is in a foreign country, does not know the language, and is haunted by migraine-enhanced paranoiac fears that the Denver mobster will find her. All of this may or may not be connected to a rash of deaths involving women who have been the fatal victims of botched abortions. To make matters worse, Gilberto’s formidable mother does not approve of Roz and seems capable of all kinds of measures to subvert their marriage (“One doesn’t question Dona Anabela,” a character ominously warns). The team of Star and Beatty (Dancing for the General, 2017) has fashioned not so much a mystery as a soap opera. There are melodramatic revelations scattered throughout (“He was the only link Gilberto had to the dark, forbidden cult that was involved in his first wife’s murder”), and basic expository information is repeated as if readers had missed the previous day’s episode and needed to be brought up to speed. But just as with a soap opera, it is easy to get swept up in the story even when credulity is strained to the limit. Roz is a sympathetic heroine, and readers will root for Gilberto, who defied expectations he would join the family gemstone business to become a cop. A strong sense of place is another virtue in this enjoyable, fish-out-of-water tale.
A guilty pleasure just dying to be read on a Rio beach during Carnival.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9893578-9-0
Page Count: 333
Publisher: D. M. Kreg Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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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