Jo’s intelligence and talent make it hard to accept her entanglement with one-dimensional Ivan in this sexless romance.
A jewelry designer’s intriguing new commission expands into an overplotted adventure from mystery author Barclay (A Final Discord, 2005, etc.).
Wealthy businessman Ivan Digby, who’s purchased the Fieldingley Necklace, asks Jo Radcliff to use its stones in an updated design for his ditzy fiancée, Miri Gale. Jo is reluctant to break up the historic piece with its perfectly matched Burmese rubies, but the project excites her imagination, and she designs a delicate necklace that meets her finicky client’s approval. When she takes it to her gemologist friend Ben Webber to check it for flaws, they’re shocked to discover that the rubies, though they date from the 1800s, are man-made. A furious Ivan sues Betsy Fieldingley, a talented artist who used the money from the purchase to buy herself accommodations. Miri, meanwhile, breaks off her engagement and, encouraged by Jo’s self-centered thespian brother, attempts to leverage her Vanna White–style job into an acting career. Finding Shakespeare over her head, she moves to a new handler, who uses the publicity over the necklace to find work more suited to her talents. And Jo, not to be outdone, drifts into an affair with the devastated Ivan, who’s still besotted with Miri, even though Jo’s really attracted to Betsy’s grandson Tim. The publicity Betsy receives leads to a resurgence in popularity for her botanical paintings. But Tim, incensed about the lawsuit, accuses Jo—whose original design is being reproduced in a limited edition with semiprecious stones—of selling out for publicity. When Miri and Ivan get back together, Jo, still hoping to derail the lawsuit, designs some jewelry for the wedding. She hopes Ivan will accept some of Betsy’s paintings in return for dropping the suit. Whew.
Jo’s intelligence and talent make it hard to accept her entanglement with one-dimensional Ivan in this sexless romance.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-7278-6413-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2006
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
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
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