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Summary
Summary
In a quiet New England town, the Newhalls live an uneventful life with their adopted daughter. When the child's birth mother is murdered, the first suspect is the adoptive father. The author of The Unforgiven and No Way Home delivers a complex, emotionally intense family-in-peril thriller.
Author Notes
Patricia MacDonald's books are popular in America and France. Her novels include Suspicious Origin, Stranger in the House, Not Guilty, and The Unforgiven.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Thirteen-year-old Jenny Newhall is a normal adolescent: bright, big-hearted and snappish to her adoptive mother. Jenny's birth mother, teenager Linda Emery, hid her pregnancy and disappeared from her home in Massachusetts, leaving grieving relatives to assume she had been killed. Now, when Linda shows up unannounced on the Newhall's doorstep on Mother's Day, skeletons clatter from closets all over town, and soon Linda's bloodied body turns up in a dumpster. Suspicion points to Jenny's adoptive father, Greg, who evades arrest and goes underground, trying to unravel clues that could make his family whole again. The police investigation headed by laconic loner Walter Ference exposes infidelity, sexual extortion and the key to an earlier murder. MacDonald, an Edgar award nominee for The Unforgiven , digs with relish into the town's secrets and its stockpile of hot emotions--betrayal, rejection, anger, jealousy and unrequited lust--pushing the buttons that titillate readers but failing to cohere into a focused narrative. The suspense she generates is disappointingly stop-and-go, loosening its hold too quickly after each revelation and falling away into mundane details. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Not much of a Mother's Day for Karen Newhall: her adoptive daughter Jenny's birth mother, Linda Emery, turns up unannounced on her suburban Massachusetts doorstep and, two days later, just as rebellious Jenny's been cooing over Linda and making plans to visit her back in Chicago, Karen gets herself bumped off, leaving her husband Greg as the obvious suspect. Greg's reaction to all this- -running away from the arresting officers--seems like the final blow, but there are plenty of other suspects, from Linda's inhospitable brother to a Peeping Tom night clerk at the motel she never checked out of. McDonald (No Way Home, etc.) lays on the terrified (but plucky) heroines, abusive men, weirdly disjointed subplots, and incredible secrets from the past in a mix calculated to appeal to the more ravenous (and less discriminating) fans of Mary Higgins Clark.
Booklist Review
Take a peaceful, picture-postcard small town, peel back the layers of tranquillity and neighborliness, and chances are you'll expose a roiling cauldron of sleaze and slime. MacDonald finds exactly that in her latest novel, a gripping thriller that's bursting with suspense and drama. Wayland, Massachusetts, residents Karen and Greg Newhall adopted a baby girl 13 years ago. Now their daughter is a beautiful young lady; Karen and Greg feel their lives are complete . . . until, out of the blue, Jenny's biological mother, Linda Emery, appears. Linda grew up in Wayland, then simply disappeared one day. Her family never heard from her again and gave her up for dead. Her return provokes more distress than happiness and sets off a chain of events that turns grisly when Linda is murdered--only the first in a series of shocking events that will turn the town upside down. MacDonald grabs her readers on page one and keeps them turning pages until the satisfying if predictable ending. And if her dialogue, plot, and characters occasionally turn trite, the keep-'em-guessing suspense makes up for it. This one will be popular, so buy plenty. (Reviewed Jan. 15, 1994)0446516856Emily Melton
Library Journal Review
Karen Newhall's Mother's Day is upset when her adopted daughter Jenny's birth mother appears on her doorstep. But her whole life is capsized two days later when the woman is found murdered and Karen's husband, Greg, is the prime suspect--because, he admits, he had an extramarital affair with the victim 14 years earlier and Jenny is actually his real daughter. The news of the affair devastates Karen, and when Greg escapes from police custody, she begins to wonder if he also lied about the murder. MacDonald supplies plenty of suspects in her large cast of characters and then provides a satisfying, albeit predictable, ending. She has written several mass-market best sellers, including No Way Home (Dell, 1990), and this new entry will be welcomed by her fans. Recommended. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 11/1/93.-- Rebecca House Stankowski, Purdue Univ. Calumet Lib., Hammond, Ind. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
