Betrayed by her husband, a self-absorbed politician, Elm MacBride escapes to Switzerland where she meets Irishman and widower Johnny Graney, and as love blossoms between them, Elm's power hungry husband enters the picture, drawing her into a deadly game that could destroy them all. Original.
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"An enthralling page-turner -- not to be missed!" -- New York Times bestselling author Joan Johnston
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1.0 out of 5 stars
One of the worst books I've ever read--So bad I laughed,
This review is from: Southern Belle (Mira) (Mass Market Paperback)
In this book, there is absolutely no support for the sudden changes in the characters' personalities. One day, the heroine is a dependent woman, not able to contradict either her father or her husband. Hearing about her husband's infidelities suddenly changes her completely and she suddenly gets the courage to leave him. However, she just as suddenly becomes dependent again so that her husband can poison her via an evil medical doctor, supposedly blackmailed because the heroine's husband knew the medical doctor did cocaine while the medical doctor was a college student. Give me a break! It might hurt a politician in some areas if it were found out that the politician had taken cocaine in college, but nobody looks into that for doctors. There are just too many doctors--they're not in the same public position as politicians--they aren't elected.
I really don't know what there was to like about the heroine. When she finds out her husband has been having an affair, she interrupts her best friend's law practice, without an appointment or even calling, while her friend is under tremendous pressure and in the midst of an incredibly demanding day. The heroine cannot wait until the evening to ask her friend to file divorce petitions for the heroine. Pretty self-centered and selfish of her if you ask me. Easy to tell the heroine has never had a real job, but later we're somehow supposed to believe she is successful as a member of the US House of representatives, even though earlier in the book she admitted to no interest in politics and the author describes how she and her husband never discussed policy. She falls in love with an Irishman. OF course he's a incredibly handsome, rich and a viscount. There are evil drug lords who are poisoning the locals with toxic sludge. Her best friend, (a countess, of course!) from the heroine's Swiss boarding school days and the viscount stage an elaborate rescue to save the heroine from the evil doctor's clinic. This rescue takes several days to plan, and every day the heroine is at risk of dying from the heavy metal (selenium) with which the evil doctor is poisoning the heroine. (On the orders of heroine's husband, of course.) This contrasts with characters' putting off things, like rescuing her from the clinic two days earlier, because of how it might look. Listening to the various characters dither and contradict themselves was like listening to fingernails screeching on a blackboard. The staff of her pre-civil war mansion are descendents of slaves the heroine's ancestors owned before the Civil war. The heroine calls them by their first names. They call her Miss Elm. Her great grandmother saved the mansion, first by intimidating the Northern soldiers, and then by sleeping with the Northern Army commander who came to her mansion. This author is incredibly ignorant of Southern history, but then her biography says she uses her experiences growing up in Europe in the jet set of old money to plot her novels. The author reports that the heroine's great great grandmother saved their mansion outside of Savannah from Sherman's march by, first, yelling at the Union soldiers and then sleeping with the commanding officer. This is totally unrealistic First off, Sherman's march of destruction started in Atlanta and ended in Savannah. The march began in November, after the crops had been gathered. The Union troups found the barns bursting with grain, fodder, and peas, the outhouses full of cotton, the yards crowded with hogs, chickens, and turkeys. The soldiers in the Southern armies were starving, not because there was no food, but because the rail roads had been destroyed and it was impossible to send supplies to the front. Sherman was not content simply to use what food and supplies he needed, but boasted that he would "smash things to the sea" and make Georgia howl. His men entered dwellings, taking everything of value that could be moved, such as silver plate and jewelry; and killed and left dead in the pens thousands of hogs, sheep and poultry. Many dwellings were burned without any justification. Sherman in his own Memoirs testifies to the conduct of his men, estimating that he had destroyed $80,000,000 worth of property of which he could make no use. This he describes as "simple waste and destruction." One of the most serious aspects of his work was the destruction of the railroads; the Central from Macon to Savannah, for instance, was almost totally ruined. According to Angle and Miers (1960), Sherman had no black soldiers in his army and did not think highly of them. Second, when the Confederates realized that Sherman was headed toward Savannah (he feinted toward Augusta, Georgia, to lead the South off course), the Confederates removed everything they could from his path and burned the rest. The Confederate Congress told the people, "Remove your negroes, horses, cattle, and provisions from Sherman's army, and burn what you cannot carry away. Burn all bridges and block up the roads in his route. Assail the invader in front. flank, and rear, by night and by day. Let him have no rest." By the time Gen. Sherman came near Savannah, having burned a wide swath all the way from Atlanta, all the roads were blocked by felled trees and other debris and all the supplies and population had fled the vicinity. It took several days for Sherman's huge army to enter Savannah. Since they had destroyed all the railroads on their way to Savannah, there were no supply lines. This huge army (100,000 men plus horses) had to "march on its belly." No way they did not destroy everything around Savannah, even if the heroine's mansion was not directly between Savannah and Atlanta. Third, by the time Sherman's scorched earth policy had drawn near Savannah, everyone knew what sort of atrocities Sherman was committing. . I was raised in the South, with ancestors who were the poor folk that were drafted to fight. No Southern woman would think it worth giving up her virtue to save a house, especially not to one of Sherman's troup! As noted above, Sherman's army acted like savages. The whole purpose of Sherman's march was to "break the back" of the South. As his march started in Atlanta and ended in Savannah, people around Savannah had had time to hear what the Union Army was No woman would have slept with one of the Northern commanders just to save her home. If the author does not know the history, she could easily look it up! I found the above information in 5 minutes on the internet. I looked it up because her description just didn't make sense doing. Dramatic events keep happening, with no resolution or no evidence of causing either good or bad developments in the character of the people in this novel. For example, the heroine's local best friend, the attorney, who has a good marriage, loses her husband in a freak boating accident just at the end of the book. The friend is falling apart, but the heroine doesn't do anything about it, and this is unresolved. Maybe this is the friend's payback for delaying the filing of the divorce for a couple of weeks? (However, the friend worked hard to save the heroine from being poisoned) This is just one of the many unresolved, and frankly senseless conflicts in the plot. (Gee, how many stereotypes have we had so far?) The viscount is described as wonderful, but there's nothing very substantial about what makes him wonderful, except he's rich, Irish and a viscount. The viscount has been having problems as the single parent of a 13 year old son, and suddenly, with one conversation, things are wonderful again with his son after several years of problems. That happens over and over again--things switch from horrible to wonderful without any real explanation. The heroine is not only a wonderful mother to the viscount's 13-year old son as soon as she meets him (although as far as I could tell, she not only has no children of her own, but she doesn't associate with teenagers at all), but she is an acclaimed artist, runs a program for abused women, and runs her husband's congressional office when she is elected to fulfill his term. She does a WAY better job than he ever did, of course, but after getting lot of great programs through, she is quitting after her 2 year term in order to raise lots of babies at the viscount's ancestral castle in Ireland. This book was so awful, I just had to keep reading it. I wanted to see if the author would ever make any of the characters real people with realistic problems. The author never did. It reminded me of the "penny dreadful" novels written in the 19th century. Many of these were paid by the word, so the authors just packed in as many plot devices as possible. At 500 pages, with so little originality, one might think the author was being paid by the word. I will never subscribe to a Mira books monthly subscription, because I don't want to pay for books like this. Thanks goodness I got this one for free.
4.0 out of 5 stars
intriguing tale,
This review is from: Southern Belle (Mira) (Mass Market Paperback)
In Savannah, thirty-four years old Elm MacBride is hurt when she realized that her husband Harlan, a two time Congressman with higher ambitions, had a mistress, her high school nemesis Jennifer Ball. Distraught, Elm visits her friend attorney Meredith Hunter who admits she knew of the affair, but insists that Elm placed Harlan on a pedestal as being Mr. Perfect. Elm decides to obtain a divorce while fleeing for Giocanda Mancini's chalet in Gstaad, Switzerland during his House re-election campaign built on family values.Thoroughbred horse breeder Viscount Johnny Graney comes to Gstaad because his mother insisted on a family vacation. Johnny, a widow with a teenage child, and Elm meet. Both are shocked by an instant attraction as Johnny has not found any woman appealing since his wife died and Elm had always believed that Harlan was Mr. Right. However, as they fall in love, Harlan with his Lady Macbeth like ambitions will do anything conceivable including becoming a widower to insure his wife will not remain his only liability to becoming re-elected. Though it is difficult on the surface to accept how far Harlan (he is too amoral for his wife and her father not to grasp his real nature) will go to insure another term, Fiona Hood-Stewart makes him seem very realistic. The story line starts as a character study predominantly looking close into the heroine as she evolves from her self-indulged cocoon. Ultimately the tale switches gear into an intrigue as nothing will stop Harlan from his objectives. The romance between Johnny and Elm underscore the plot transformation that readers will enjoy. Harriet Klausner
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