With a popular comic strip, card line, and children's cartoon to her name, Lucy Brighton should be in a happy place. But the ache of a cold, lonely childhood lingers on. Even though she still lives in the New Jersey house where she grew up, Lucy has had little contact with her parents since they moved to Florida five years ago.
Finding Joy In The Present
Then Lucy receives a call that her parents have been killed in a car crash. While settling their affairs in Florida, Lucy begins to realize how little she really knew about their lives. She has no way to explain the mysterious safe in their bedroom, with its cache of fake passports, cash, and weapons. What secrets were the Brightons keeping? Were they even who they claimed to be? The answers will shatter everything she once believed about her parents--and about herself.
Praise for Fern Michaels and her novels
"Tirelessly inventive and entertaining." -- Booklist on Up Close and Personal
"Fast-moving. . .entertaining. . .a roller-coaster ride of serendipitous fun." -- Publishers Weekly on Mr. and Miss Anonymous
"Heartbreaking, suspenseful, and tender." -- Booklist on Return to Sender
"A knockout story." -- Publishers Weekly on Dear Emily
Fern Michaels isn’t a person. I’m not sure she’s an entity either since an entity is something with separate existence. Fern Michaels® is what I DO. Me, Mary Ruth Kuczkir. Growing up in Hastings, Pennsylvania, I was called Ruth. I became Mary when I entered the business world where first names were the order of the day. To this day, family and friends call me Dink, a name my father gave me when I was born because according to him I was ‘a dinky little thing’ weighing in at four and a half pounds. However, I answer to Fern since people are more comfortable with a name they can pronounce.
As they say, the past is prologue. I grew up, got a job, got married, had five kids. When my youngest went off to Kindergarten, my husband told me to get off my ass and get a job. Those were his exact words. I didn’t know how to do anything except be a wife and mother. I was also a voracious reader having cut my teeth on The Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, Cherry Ames and the like. The library was a magical place for me. It still is to this day. Rather than face the outside world with no skills, I decided to write a book. For some reason that didn’t intimidate me. As my husband said at the time, stupid is as stupid does. Guess what, I don’t have that husband any more. Guess what else! I wrote 99 books, most of them New York Times Best Sellers.
Moving right along here . . . Several years ago I left Ballantine Books, parted company with my agent, sold my house in New Jersey that I had lived in all my married life and in 1993 moved to South Carolina. I figured if I was going to go through trauma let it be all at one time. It was a breeze. The kids were all on their own at that point. The dump was a 300 year old plantation house that is listed in the National Registry that I remodeled. Today it is beyond belief as are the gardens and the equally old Angel Oaks that drip Spanish moss. Unfortunately, I could not get my ghost to relocate. This ghost has been documented by previous owners. Mary Margaret as we call her, is “a friendly”. She is also mischievous. It took me two weeks to figure out that she didn’t like my coffee cups. They would slide off the table or counter or else they’d break in the dishwasher. I bought red checkered ones. All are intact as of this writing. She moves pillows from one room to the other and she stops all the clocks in the house at 9:10 in the a.m. at least once a week. When the Azaleas are in bloom, and only then, I find blooms on my night stand. I have this glorious front porch and during the warm months I see my swing moving early in the morning when the air is still and again late in the day. She doesn’t spook the dogs. I always know when she’s around because the five of them line up and look like they’re at a tennis match. As of this writing we’re co-habiting nicely.
Most writers love what they do and I’m no exception. I love it when I get a germ of an idea and get it down on paper. I love breathing life into my characters. I love writing about women who persevere and prevail because that’s what I had to do to get to this point in time. It’s another way of saying it doesn’t matter where you’ve been, what matters is where you’re going and how you get there. The day I finally prevailed was the day I was inducted into the New Jersey Literary Hall of Fame. For me it was an awesome day and there are no words to describe it. I’ve been telling stories and scribbling for 37 years. I hope I can continue for another 37 years. It wasn’t easy during some of those years. As I said, I had to persevere. My old Polish grandmother said something to me when I was little that I never forgot. She said when God is good to you, you have to give back. For a while I didn’t know how to do that. When I finally figured it out I set up The Fern Michaels® Foundation.
I'm not sure what words to use to describe this book that is so utterly, despairingly bad that I am still struggling to understand why I even bothered to finish it! The storyline is so far beyond far-fetched that it's just ridiculous. The conversations are highly improbably - real people (and yes, I do realise that these are fictional people, but still - let's keep it withing the realms of reality) just don't talk like those portrayed in this book. I am not even going to go into detail about the characters, plot or anything else. Maybe some of these blunders might have been forgivable had the book been well written, but it's not. This is not what one expects from a No.1 Bestselling author. It's deplorable.
I have the same opinion of this book as a lot of people here. The first 100 or so pages were great, then I don't know what happened, it just fell flat. Some of the things were just silly, like Luke building a studio in his backyard when he's know Lucy for 10 minutes. So many of Fern Michaels more recent characters seem to have endless money and endless connections, and aren't realistic. And some of the conversations were just ridiculous, things that normal people do not say to each other. I don't know what happened to the amazing quality of books that this author put out years ago in her Texas and Kentucky series, as well as the sin series and Cinders to Satin. Those were such fantastic books, it's like a totally different author. I don't know how long I will keep reading her books, they just seem to really disappoint.
I did enjoy the fast pace of this book. Easy read and the author does keep you guessing until the end who is Lucy's parents.
what I dont seem to get from these authors is the constant need to have their leads fall in love by eye contact, a kiss or a simple conversation. Get back to real world and maybe just maybe ask women who have dated this century what the hell its really like!
I may have read something by this author before and I needed another easy airplane book so I picked this up. If you're satisfied reading dialog where the characters continue to use the word "sh#tty" to describe their situations, lives and feelings and where the author was ok using "beat feet" to describe how quickly a person hurried to the store, then follow this author. I enjoyed the setup of the story but finished just because I was captive on the plane. I don't care how many books the author has had on the best seller list, she could use a few writing lessons. I won't be looking for any more of her books
In spite of the title, I am afraid I I will forget this book. It started out with great potential but fell flat. The mystery was set up with great suspense, but then the second half of the book fell flat. The second half spent too much time dealing with the three main characters' relationships (which seemed juvenile) instead of concentrating on the mystery. Could have been a great book, but there were too many unanswered questions by the end.
The sample was great, those first couple chapters really made me think I was going to get into a fantastic story and it really could have been. After I hit buy I don't really know what happened. She lost me with the whole mind-reading thing. I kept thinking making this has something to do with the plot later on, but no, it was just weird. I felt like ten different people wrote this book because the things that went on didn't really go together or make much sense.
This really could have been a very good book. I wish the author didn't feel the need to throw in the required romance, which did absolutely nothing for the story. The main story line, which ended up being a bit unrealistic, did keep me quite interested. However, the love story was very far-fetched, juvenile and almost embarrassing. I was surprised that it was written by the same author.
Pretty good until I got to the end when it got mushy ridiculous-- almost like the author gave up really writing decent dialogue. Much of the premise was pretty far out and unbelievable as well. Fluff reading.
Another very good book as evidenced by the fact that I brought it home around noon on Saturday and finished it at noon today (Sunday).. Thanks Fern, you never fail to entertain me with your writing...
I can go hot or cold with Fern Michaels' books but I liked this one. The whole premise just excited me.
Lucy Brighton, the illustrator of a line of children's greeting cards, calendars, comic strip,and children's tv cartoon based on animal characters of Bizzy (a fat male white Persian cat), Izzy (a fat little male Yorkshire terrier), and Lizzy (who is a male parrot with red and green feathers) with the plan of adding Dizzy, a female duck has just finished her work for the year (it is Fall) and packages up her completed work to ship out (including a children's book proposal for the characters) and begins to think about a vacation and some rest. Little does she know that she will immediately be thrust into spy thriller personal drama
This 30 something woman is filthy rich due to the success of her work and company IBL (initials for her original three characters) but has personal unhappiness. Her childhood was missing a lot of things. She has only a couple of very early happy memories of her parents but mostly was raised by housekeepers until she was 10 and sent off to boarding school while her heart surgeon father and psychiatrist mother began traveling the world doing treatments- or so she was told. She had no friends as a kid, didn't learn to skate, sled, swim, ride a bike or other ordinary things, and now lives in her parents New Jersey mansion since they have moved to Florida 5 years earlier. The house seems cold and impersonal to her and a few months earlier, she made an offer to buy a 55 acre property with a big house and a 4 bedroom bunkhouse she can use as a studio. She also has hired her best friend from college, Angie, as a graphic artist so all seems to be well.
Things stop being well when she receives a phone call from a police officer in Florida who announces that her parents have been killed in an auto accident caused by a 16 year old boy who was drunk and who also died in the head on collision. The nightmare begins. Lucy flies first class to Florida and this is where things really begin to seem unrealistic in the way Fern Michaels wrote the book. She had no trouble booking the flight. It went perfectly. She got to Florida and the way she handled the estate- just emailed and faxed stuff to a lawyer she found online was peculiar. No law firm is going to let a stranger just fax them papers, a credit card and driver's license copy, and take on the case without even meeting with or speaking with the potential client. She never spoke with them once nor signed any contracts.
The real jolt came when she realized no one actually was living in the house. There were 7 sets of everything for a man to wear and 7 sets for a woman, no food, no cosmetics or hairbrushes used, the house was identical to the one in New Jersey and she found a hidden safe by accident that was full of money (close to a million in cash), guns, bullets, and phony driver's licenses and passports from different countries for her parents. She also discovered that when she was 10, two ten million dollar life insurance policies were taken out with her as beneficiary. She has an encounter with an attractive builder who runs the company that built the Florida house Luke Kingston after she has packed up all of the stuff (including the contents of the secret safe and the urns containing her parents) and loaded it in Dad's Range Rover. Unfortunately, the meeting is after she was struck by lightning just as she was about to drive off and she wound up hospitalized for days but sent back to her parents' home to be cared for by the neighbors Adel and Buddy Longhurst (Adel was a nurse), a pair of empty nesters who never see or hear from their own grown kids.
Fern Michaels always seems to feature young women who have all the money in the world, earned in ways they likely would not have gained the money they have. She also has weird things that make no sense in the books and here we run into more of that. Luke decides he is in love with Lucy based on her green eyes. Who knows what would happen to him if he ever visited Ireland? Or even met me- I have green eyes myself. All he does from then on is discuss her green eyes with everyone. Also, while it was Lucy's FOOT that was almost seared off, suddenly she didn't know who she was or anything about herself and decided along with Adel and Buddy to call them Mom and Dad. Plus as the cherry on top of the nuttiness, she suddenly gets her memory back and then can read minds. Oh please, Fern, make it stop.
Angie comes and drives her back to New Jersey where they find that the mystery- and Luke (after the FBI shows up) follow them and where they find out that the New Jersey house has a secret safe with the same kind of stuff in it- and someone wants it back! Who were these people? Lucy becomes convinced that they were not her parents and frankly the idea that a kid would live with her parents for 10 years then suddenly have a whole different set of parents show up and she wouldn't notice it wasn't the same people is ridiculous.
This is an easy read and it was fun. There is more unbelievable stuff to come so be prepared to suspend reality in a big way. She has some saccharin sweet material about Luke and Lucy (I just met you but plan to stick my tongue in your mouth and suck out your tonsils? What woman says that?) and some unrealistic stuff about animals- she gets a dog, cat, parrot and duck and sleeps with them, lets them chew up everything and pee on the carpet and is GLAD about it? She writes the duck into her characters with it losing its feathers and the parrot giving it some of his then starting a parrot-duck love affair? Oh please.
Story was actually really good up until the middle. I love the main character and the fact that she is very similar to me (loves animals, loves art, lives alone, doesn't want kids) but although she started out likeable, she soon became very unlikeable. Stereotypically unlucky and with a hatred for all humans around her. When she gained her psychic powers because of a lightning strike while holding up the lid of a metal garbage can and was coincidentally saved by the next-door neighbors of her parents' house who somehow knew all about her... that sorta put me off, too. I'm sorry, but it's very unrealistic. Maybe the story gets better towards the end. I shouldn't judge a book by its' cover. Maybe I'll give it another try sometime later. But when I get bored halfway through a story and can't push myself to read the entire thing.. mmm, I'll pass. Sorry.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
This book was okay I guess the thing I didn't like about this book was the suspence was build up and then in the end it was not what I expected. I thought this book would be a high speed action pack book since in the beggining found out that her parents were not who they claimed to be. From there the book went into too many details and took too long to get to the point. I mean really did author have described every single time the character Lucy ate, what she ate, what the food looked and tasted like, every detail of what her house look like, the funiture, the carpert, the closet, her shoes, her bed, the color of the covers & pillows on her bed, the clothes she wore, the car she drove, the color of the truck that delivered her packages...and so on &...so on....Geez, after describing all that by the time I got to the end of the book I almost fell asleep. I felt like the author could at least gave Lucy closure about her parents, not just two or three sentence and endes the book. All in all i'd give this book a C-
i liked this book for the most part. a little too chatty, though. conversations that jumped from topic to topic, which made it a little frustrating to follow at times. and then there were the several safe scenes. i never could figure out where the urns were until much later when the women were driving and. they mentioned the urns. also when second safe was found, it was clearly stated that no umbrella was found, yet one was magicallly pushed!! where did it come from? i liked the ending, the plot was good. but there was something just not right with the romance. it was so boring! overall it was a good book, though.
So much potential. This is definitely a book where the cover does not at all betray the plot. My husband laughed when I started telling the complicated situation on which Lucy found herself.
Near the end the author chooses to give up on the complicated mess by having one player just give in to it all and retire so he can tell the truth. The end was redeemed somewhat in the epilogue.
I wanted to give it 4 or 5 stars until the plot fell apart.
I don't usually read books like this but I was in the mood for something light. I have to say that this is the stupidest book I have read in a long time. It doesn't make any sense, strains your credulity, and has the most improbably events in it. If I could give it less than 1 star I would. I kept reading because I was amazed at the "plot." At the end, I was surprised that the Knights Templar or the Masons were not involved in the conspiracy.
Rather incomplete plot lines, far-fetched events and simplistic, inaccurate vocabulary. The clincher was calling an Iris Recognition scanner an eyeball scanner! There was a scene where the author kept contradicting herself, actually there were a couple scenes like that. As someone else said, there were so many opportunities missed to expand on the story line and really increase the intrigue and mystery. The characters were just so so and I had a hard time finishing this book.
This is a nice love story about second chances. I likes that there was also a mystery going on during the story, and that the story had great characters. It was an easy read in a day, and I would encourage others to enjoy it.The plot was very easy to follow, and I read it straight through. It was a great book, for a cold inside day.
What???! This cannot possibly be the same author at wrote all of those awesome books. This book sucks and I skipped thru most of the ending. Didn't even care anymore once I got there.
I thought this was a cute book. It had a mix of intrigue, friendship, mystery, romance. It was a little far fetched, but i found it to be an easy read and entertaining.
This is a cute , sweet story of boy meets girl and gets the girl. There is some spy business thrown into the mix for a little spice. It was a quick easy read.