Customer Reviews

A Secret Life (Hotel Marchand)

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This is another one of my 1.00 a pop picks from the local thrift store.

The pacing was good, Joan and Anthony showed some true chemistry, and having them both be so bullheaded made for some great interaction. Heather was a surprise. She went from being an flaky cloying character to a sort of silly gal that seemed like she would be a hoot to hang around with. The fictional murder in Joan's novel revealing the loose ends of the real murder it was based on was interesting. Too bad there couldn't have been more to this book.

Though he was her boss, New York based Prism Literary Agency agent Anthony Verdun fires his assistant Clarista Phillips for sexually harassing him via interoffice mail by sending him red lace panties and an explicit invitation. His feeling of freedom ends when he finds Jules Burrell's name on the front page of the Lifestyle section of the New York Times. Apparently vindictive Clarista informed the newspaper that Jules is Joan Bateman. Anthony knows Joan will fire him and the agency because all she has asked of him over the years is to protect her identity.

Anthony travels to Indio, Louisiana to talk to Joan in person. However, the damage is out of control as her Boston Brahmin family is horrified by her writing pulp fiction mysteries even if they are bestsellers. As he deals with the media frenzy over the outing of Bateman, the fan uproar, someone wanting to harm Joan and him, alligator attacks, and the worst adversary of all her sister Heather, Anthony knows he loves Joan to the point that he is ready to take on her parents and even call Heather his sister-in-law, but he also believes he is not good enough for her. Joan has fallen in love with her agent, but does not realize how much she will miss him when he returns to New York.

Though the connection to the Hotel Marchand is minimal at best as the story line focuses on the relationship between the writer and her agent, A SECRET LIFE is a fun Bayou tale. Joan and Anthony are a nice pairing as their business deal turns personal with her outing though more about why the heroine "fears" her seemingly Draconian parents (at least in the minds of the formerly uptight siblings) would have rounded out the thriller. Still this is a fine thriller starring an author who gets her groove.

Harriet Klausner

One of the problems with category romance is that the primary focus is on the romance between the main characters, with everything else as trappings to set up the situation. This means that due to space considerations, the stories are sometimes not terribly deep. When you have two romances going on, the plot sometimes gets lost along the way.

Barbara Dunlop had all the making of a good story here and I have to admit I greatly enjoyed the first few chapters. There came a point there, though, were things seemed to be glossed over. I never understood why Joan was so willing to accept her family's dismissal of her gifts or why Heather, who seems horribly bound up in appearance and propriety, is so willing to through all of that over for the man whose parents were the inspiration of her sister's latest best-seller. Another twenty or thirty thousand words that could have delved into the characters and what drives them would have helped tremendously. It's not the Ms. Dunlop isn't good a writer; she has all the makings of a compelling story in this book. Unfortunately, in this instance she has been short-changed by the conventions of the series romance genre.