Ms Roberts used to occupy a lot of shelf space in the cottage, but none of her offerings made it to the boat.
I saw this in the supermarket at £4 some time ago, but didn’t bother with it as there was loads of material to choose from in the laundry here.
However, someone had filled those shelves with books by only one or two authors, some of which I had already read, so I thought, why not?
The story is familiar insomuch as a young girl falls in love with a man she hardly knows and runs away to marry him.
A baby later, he is killed in a freak boating accident, and it transpires that he is not who he said he was, but a liar and a cheat.
Leaving her in debt to the tune of millions of dollars, the first couple of chapters see her selling her home and belongings before moving back to her home town.
A PI is already on the case, believing her to know more than she’s letting on about her deceased husband’s dealings, but I didn’t believe for one minute he was legit, which was kinda proven by the end of chapter 8, but it turned out he was after a finder’s fee more than anything else.
This book is flooded with characters, siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, a couple of grannies, friends, their siblings, cousins, parents etc, and quite honestly, I got pretty tired pretty quickly trying to work out if they were relevant to the plot or just dressing to suggest a close knit community in a little town where everyone knew everyone else.
Throw in a love interest, and bingo. Another Nora Roberts hit.
This is a tale of fraud, false marriages, double-dealing and double crosses, a couple of murders, some bitchy former class mates who got their comeuppance (irrelevant to the major plot but funny when one got a punch in the face), some great one line bantering between our heroine’s brother and the love interest, plus some rather fast paced reading before the grand finale.
After several chapters, I had to finish it to see if I was correct in my thinking and supposition of the outcome.
I couldn’t help but compare it to the storyline of Double Jeopardy (1999, starring Tommy Lee Jones, Ashley Judd and Bruce Greenwood), though in this case our female lead didn’t go to jail for murder.
On a scale of 1 to 10 (discounting the unnecessary extra characters), hovering around 7 as it was a good story. It would probably make a good film.
I’ve put it up in the laundry for someone else to read and enjoy.
pensitivity101 