Customer Reviews

Lost Innocence

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4 star:		(1)
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As the editorial review states, this is a book about betrayal and, as the title suggests, lost innocence. When in the opening pages of this story Alicia's highly successful lawyer husband, Craig, drops dead in their car, a whole back story is unleashed which is the driver of current events. Alicia moves back to her childhood home with her young daughter and 17 year old son. Living there also is her brother, Robert, and her sister-in-law, Sabrina, and Sabrina's 15 year old daugher Annabelle. These are the characters who drive the story. Briefly, Annabelle is an ill-mannered and dangerous girl mixing with the wrong types, into drugs, alcohol and illegal and indiscriminant sex. When at the crisis point of the book she tells Craig (on whom she is fixated) that her mother and his father had a torrid and long affair, he is shocked and then behaves in such a way that she brings an accusation of rape. The remainder of the book is taken up trying to understand what actually happened, why and how the justice system and police deal with such matters.

This book is filled with high emotions and sharply drawn characters for the most part but it falls a bit short on the melodrama that some of them engage in. The writing is crisp and well done; no issues with the quality of the author's prose and story telling abilities. If I must make a criticisn it is that some of the actions some characters take are just a bit too melodramatic to seem plausible. However, that did not really detract from my overall enjoyment of this page turner. There is an interesting cast of secondary characters in the story and despite the generally dark tone of the book, there are, through these secondary actors, some chinks of light for the future. I can't give this one 5 stars but it's certainly a 4 star read: entertaining and gripping and a good read.