Customer Reviews

The Island

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

Keeping true to her latest award willing formula NY Times best selling author, Heather Graham goes back to a locale that has been featured in some of her most recent novels with a creative and original story set off the coast of Florida and Miami.

On a weekend getaway with her brother and niece, Beth Anderson is panic-stricken when she comes upon a skull on the beach, and instantly recalls the disappearance of a retired couple last seen in that area. Beth was even more unnerved when a handsome stranger came upon them and quickly covered up their discovery. When Beth returned with her brother to show him her find, it's no longer there and he dismisses her discovery thinking she mistook a conch shell for the skull. Beth knows what she saw, but without the skull she certainly can't bring the authorities in to investigate, however, that doesn't stop her from trying to unravel the mystery herself.

The bigger mystery that weekend was the enigmatic Keith Henson, the stranger from the beach who seems to keep turning up at the oddest times and whose presence just doesn't seem to ring true. Additionally, the man simply unnerves her by his sheer masculinity. Perhaps she was paranoid but it just seemed to Beth that the rest of the weekend vacationers on the island all seemed to have other agendas besides a little fun in the sun.

This was a decent read, fast-paced, with the suspense kept at the forefront throughout the story. The romance that developed between Beth and Keith was definitely hot, in spite of Beth not trusting Keith, and he never telling her the truth of what he was really up to. Graham fills the pages with a plethora of characters, which at times I thought needed a list in order to keep them straight. The ending was wrapped up neatly in an edge of the seat climax that solves all the mystery of who done what to whom! One question that remains unresolved though - I never did get the point of Ambers' friend Kim's defection??? Otherwise, a very compelling read.

I read some Heather Graham books years ago and enjoyed their plotting and dialog. I bought The Island based on those older books. Unfortunately this book simply doesn't stand up. The plot is threadbare. The characters are irritating (yet another book in the stupid-heroine genre). Some of the dialog is just bad. The whole book wanders along aimlessly, then wraps up with a few pages of everyone suddenly acting decisive and heroic - way out of character. I'm afraid Graham phoned this one in, and her editor was out to lunch.

With members of the yacht club where she works, Beth Anderson looks forward to spending her vacation with her widower brother Ben, his fourteen years old daughter Amber and her best pal Kim Smith on tiny Calliope Key, two to three hours from Miami. That is she has R&R until the three females find a human skull, which Beth ponders if this is the remains of one of the missing expert sailors, retirees Ted and Molly Monaco.

When stranger Keith Henson arrives, Beth hides the finding. Her niece gives the newcomer the ten second third degree that only a young teen (or Macaulay Culkin in Uncle Buck) could perform. When Beth returns for the hidden skull, she finds it missing; Ben insists it was a conch. However, Beth believes whoever took the skull remains nearby ready to kill two teens and two adult siblings if needed. Keith offers to help her, but though attracted to him she wonders if he is the one who uncovered and re-hid the skull, making him the killer, but the case will twist much more bizarrely than simply that.

THE ISLAND is an exhilarating romantic suspense with the emphasis on red herrings, twists and turns (perhaps too many), and plenty of action as Beth tries to learn the truth about the vanishing skull which soon leads into "Sail into Terror". Beth is courageous as she struggles with what she knows (very little), what she speculates (a lot more all lethal), what to do and who to trust. The story line works because the ensemble cast seems genuine, as differing motives surface. Adding to the thriller is an intriguing secondary romance between Ben and a suspect that can only turn out bad for someone. Heather Graham's fans will enjoy sea cruising to THE ISLAND.

Harriet Klausner

I gave this a two because I did manage to get through the whole book, helped by the fact that it was so repetitious I could skip pages of dialog at a time. Although, like another reader I read two books in between.

Beth Anderson finds a skull while on a weekend trip with her brother and niece. She leaves it and by the time she returns it's gone. From then on she spent the whole book obsessing and suspecting everyone of everything. And when evidence really WOULD surface instead of staying with it and calling someone in, she'd run off to tell someone at which point the evidence would disappear, again. When she truly was in danger she suddenly refused to get help because she said they wouldn't believe her.

Beth was unlikable and just plain stupid.

Amanda crawled all over men every chance she got yet we were supposed to believe she really wasn't sleazy.

There was no chemistry between the male and female leads, and the ending was abrupt.

I suddenly realized that of all the Heather Graham books I've read I only kept two of them; "Long, Lean and Lethal" and "Slow Burn". There's a reason for that, they were the only ones that were really any good. Fortunately I didn't pay for this book!

The Island opens with a mystery: did Beth and her niece stumble upon a human skull while camping on a remote island? But it rapidly becomes just another typical romance novel. Beautiful Beth meets hunky Keith, and immediately feels that there's something suspicious about him. He can't say or do anything right in her eyes. No one believes her tale about the skull, but when she returns home and resumes her job as social director at the yacht club, Beth is compelled to discover whether the skull might be that of a member who disappeared months before. Soon some frightening, even threatening, incidents have her fearing for her own safety. When Keith shows up at the yacht club, she still can't trust him but is irresistibly drawn to him. It soon becomes apparent that pirates are hijacking yachts for resale.

Beth may win a prize for dumbest heroine ever written into a romance novel. She's furious that no one will take her concerns seriously, then goes blithely on with her "investigation", heedless of danger, real or imagined. She jumps into bed with Keith at every opportunity, only to regret it in the AM, and reverts to treating him badly. If the situation were reversed, it would be called sexual exploitation. At any rate, once the mystery is resolved, she jumps into marriage with Keith. There's a surprise....

If you like your skulduggery fluffy and fatuous, interspersed with steamy love scenes, you might enjoy The Island more than I did.

Beth and her family are on an island for vacation, amongst other vacationers as well. She finds a skull hidden in the sand on the beach, and is very suspicious about this guy Keith and his buddies that are walking the very same stretch of beach.... and they're coming straight toward her and the spot that the skull was found.

That's really all the farther I got in this one. The story just didn't hold my interest. Or rather, it might've if Beth wasn't freaked out about 'something' every-other second. She's too paranoid and too suspicious about what she found and started suspecting Keith and his buddies knowing or having something to do with the skull she found; and everything to do with who Keith was. It was just too dramatic and unrealistic for me.

I thought this book would be a nice summer mystery I might dig into, but once I started, I knew it wasn't going to be as intriguing as I had hoped. I would say read another one. Anything by Lisa Gardner is worth the thrill.

This was so bad I found myself laughing at times. The heroine was just ridiculous. I think if she wasn't so boring and just plain stupid I might not have thought the book was so awful.
*POTENTIAL SPOILER*
My favorite part was when she found out that the hero was undercover and her response was "But why didn't he tell me?"
I have read Heather Graham before and thought some were good - unfortunately, this wasn't one of them.

I was glad I got this one from the library. I only read about 100 pages into this and stopped because little was happening in the story. We had numerous rounds of "Did the heroine find the skull or did she imaginine it?" discussions, and I kept wanting to scream, "Yes, she did! Let's move on!"

I was also having trouble keeping track of the characters. There were a lot of different characters, none of them particularly memorable, and all with similar bland names. I even struggled to remember who the heroine was. The only thing memorable about her was that she spent most of her scenes trying to figure out if she had seen the skull or not. When she wasn't doing that, she faded into the woodwork.

Sorry--just not enough to keep me reading.

This book was a complete waste of time to read. It was not at all entertaining and took forever to get even to the mystery. SUCKS!

From the time I finished the first chapter I knew that this book wasn't going to do it for me. The main character annoyed the hell out of me with her repetative phrases and her 'sharp' speaking. I just couldn't get into the story, it wasn't interesting or compelling to keep me reading.

I am a fan of Graham but this book took me by surprise since in my opinion it wasn't up to her usual storytelling standards.