Most Helpful Customer Reviews
25 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
mind numbingly bad, November 19, 2005
This review is from: The Secret Sister (Mass Market Paperback)
The premise sounds promising: Christy McKenna, NYC fashion writer, gets a cryptic message from her estranged sister summoning her to Colorado.
What results is a haphazardly slapped together mess of a story involving models, photographers, native lands, stolen artifacts, and rogue archeologists. Yeah, rogue archeologists.
There is so much wrong with this book that it distracts from finding something right. The main characters are flat and awkward, so buying their immediate attraction is impossible. The villains have no logical reason for their villainy, except that they are rich and pretty. Like all of Lowell's contemporary novels, this one contains a mystery involving art, this time belonging to an ancient civilization.
While the researched details are interesting, no one else in the story is. The paralell storyline of our McKenna sisters and ancient sisters of the past is laughable. And I could drive a truck through the plot holes, back up, attach a horse trailer, and drive through them again.
And the secret sister herself? Atrocious. Just atrocious.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
eh, April 21, 2006
This review is from: The Secret Sister (Mass Market Paperback)
I'm sorry, but I could just not get into this book at all. It's so implausible, and I couldn't get over it. The main character ends up with the "hero" after he helps her escape from security guards after an attempted home "break-in". She does not know this man, but then lets him take her back to his house. An admitted murdered, he then proceeds to order her around and she follows blindly and cheerfully, falling in love with him despite the fact that he has technically kidnapped her. One of her reasons for following along? He wouldn't drive her back to her hotel (she could have walked, no? or called someone from her cell phone, which she uses to check her messages) I found the whole situation to be rather creepy, and the main character to be somewhat stupid. However, she did handle descriptions of the West and the Anasazi artifacts well.
I wanted to like this book, but it fell short of my expectations. The whole story seemed kind of flat and uninspired.
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15 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A reissue well worth reading!, November 2, 2005
This review is from: The Secret Sister (Mass Market Paperback)
Although this book was originally written 12 years ago, I think the story holds up very well.
Christy McKenna is a fashion editor for Horizon magazine and has just returned from two weeks vacation. She finds amid the myriad of messages and notes accumulated on her desk, a message slip marked "Urgent" from her sister Jo-Jo. They have been estranged for twelve years. Jo-Jo is known as "Jo" and has been famous fashion model for a decade. The sisters were raised by their grandmother when their parents were killed when they were young. Christy is older by 1 year and was offered a scholarship to college at age 18 which she took and thus left her sister Jo with their grandma. Christy feels guilty for abandoning Jo even though Jo is very self-centered and was always getting Christy in trouble. Christy is ordered by her boss to go out west to see the new Peter Hutton collection in Colorado. Jo-Jo is Peter Hutton's main model. Christy calls her sister and tells her she is coming.
Christy is determined not to get ensnared in any of her sister's questionable activities this time but little does she know! While Christy is wandering about the small town she steps in a museum and see a man come in with boxes of artifacts and notices that Sheriff Danner does not like him and accuses him of stealing. Peter Hutton's assistant, Autry, invites her out to the ranch ahead of the show. Much to her surprise, her sister is not there and in fact Mr. Hutton states that she "took off". At a press gathering and barbeque, Christy sneaks into the house to search her sister's room determined to get back a favorite gold nugget necklace of her Grandma's and to get clues as to where Jo-Jo is. She has to hide when a burglar is caught and beaten by the guards. Then she almost gets caught and jumps off a deck to run and runs into the "thief" from the museum, Aaron Cain.
From here on the book has lots of action, danger and mystery. While there are some holes in the plot, it was still a fun and exciting read that holds up well especially since I didn't read it the first time it was published.
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