A light and fluffy confection that’s a perfect read for a holiday break.
Passey’s (The Tree Keeper’s Promise, 2016, etc.) latest Christmas tale is a lighthearted romance inspired by Charles Dickens’ classic holiday novel.
Eleanor Fooge is running her grandmother’s fudge business in Pine Creek, Colorado, and it’s not going well. The company is losing money, and Eleanor’s control issues have alienated her business partner. When Eleanor’s angry opinions about charity go viral, the business’s reputation suffers. She’s seen as a classic Scrooge despite her strong aversion to her name’s being compared to Dickens’ famous literary character’s. Enter Cam Wilson, a consultant whom Eleanor brought in to help save the business. He had a crush on her back in high school, years ago, and he’s retained his youthful good looks and charming personality—and Eleanor takes notice. He’s also smart enough to recognize that although Eleanor can effectively make the hard decisions required to save the company, her temperament is unpredictable. She also treats her employees terribly, going so far as to force them to work on Christmas. In addition, her hatred of all things Scrooge causes her to pass up good business opportunities, such as selling fudge at a local theater company’s sold-out performances of A Christmas Carol. She just wants to save the business before her grandmother finds out about the trouble. Cam wants to do his job, but he also finds himself falling for Eleanor all over again. Passey’s spin on the Dickens tale is as sweet as the fudge that Eleanor dishes up throughout the novel. Eleanor’s transformation is expected but enjoyable, and Passey makes a good observation about Scrooge himself: “he’s generous and kindhearted by the end. But no one…wants to give him that credit. Once a miser, always a miser.” The author’s prose flows nicely, and the chemistry between Cam and Eleanor is a consistent treat. There are no steamy love scenes along the way, but Cam’s willingness to lay everything on the line for Eleanor is a Christmas gift that romance fans will want to unwrap.
A light and fluffy confection that’s a perfect read for a holiday break.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9909840-8-5
Page Count: 195
Publisher: Winter Street Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Unrelenting gloom relieved only occasionally by wrenching trauma; somehow, though, Hannah’s storytelling chops keep the...
Hannah’s sequel to Firefly Lane (2008) demonstrates that those who ignore family history are often condemned to repeat it.
When we last left Kate and Tully, the best friends portrayed in Firefly Lane, the friendship was on rocky ground. Now Kate has died of cancer, and Tully, whose once-stellar TV talk show career is in free fall, is wracked with guilt over her failure to be there for Kate until her very last days. Kate’s death has cemented the distrust between her husband, Johnny, and daughter Marah, who expresses her grief by cutting herself and dropping out of college to hang out with goth poet Paxton. Told mostly in flashbacks by Tully, Johnny, Marah and Tully’s long-estranged mother, Dorothy, aka Cloud, the story piles up disasters like the derailment of a high-speed train. Increasingly addicted to prescription sedatives and alcohol, Tully crashes her car and now hovers near death, attended by Kate’s spirit, as the other characters gather to see what their shortsightedness has wrought. We learn that Tully had tried to parent Marah after her father no longer could. Her hard-drinking decline was triggered by Johnny’s anger at her for keeping Marah and Paxton’s liaison secret. Johnny realizes that he only exacerbated Marah’s depression by uprooting the family from their Seattle home. Unexpectedly, Cloud, who rebuffed Tully’s every attempt to reconcile, also appears at her daughter’s bedside. Sixty-nine years old and finally sober, Cloud details for the first time the abusive childhood, complete with commitments to mental hospitals and electroshock treatments, that led to her life as a junkie lowlife and punching bag for trailer-trash men. Although powerful, Cloud’s largely peripheral story deflects focus away from the main conflict, as if Hannah was loath to tackle the intractable thicket in which she mired her main characters.
Unrelenting gloom relieved only occasionally by wrenching trauma; somehow, though, Hannah’s storytelling chops keep the pages turning even as readers begin to resent being drawn into this masochistic morass.Pub Date: April 23, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-312-57721-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
Connelly takes a break from his Harry Bosch police novels (The Last Coyote, p. 328, etc.) for something even more intense: a reporter's single-minded pursuit of the serial killer who murdered his twin. Even his buddies in the Denver PD thought Sean McEvoy's shooting in the backseat of his car looked like a classic cop suicide, right clown to the motive: his despondency over his failure to clear the murder of a University of Denver student. But as Sean's twin brother, Jack, of the Rocky Mountain News, notices tiny clues that marked Sean's death as murder, his suspicions about the dying message Sean scrawled inside his fogged windshield—"Out of space. Out of time"—alert him to a series of eerily similar killings stretching from Sarasota to Albuquerque. The pattern, Jack realizes, involves two sets of murders: a series of sex killings of children, and then the executions (duly camouflaged as suicides) of the investigating police officers. Armed with what he's dug up, Jack heads off to Washington, to the Law Enforcement Foundation and the FBI. The real fireworks begin as Jack trades his official silence for an inside role in the investigation, only to find himself shut out of both the case and the story. From then on in, Jack, falling hard for Rachel Walling, the FBI agent in charge of the case, rides his Bureau connections like a bucking bronco—even as one William Gladden, a pedophile picked up on a low-level charge in Santa Monica, schemes to make bail before the police can run his prints through the national computer, then waits with sick patience for his chance at his next victim. The long-awaited confrontation between Jack and Gladden comes at an LA video store; but even afterward, Jack's left with devastating questions about the case. Connelly wrings suspense out of every possible aspect of Jack's obsessive hunt for his brother's killer. Prepare to be played like a violin.
Pub Date: Jan. 15, 1996
ISBN: 0-316-15398-2
Page Count: 440
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1995
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