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Hidden Identity #2
Wed to a Stranger?
Harlequin Intrigue, number 418, from the "Hidden Identity" miniseries
256 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 1997
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
July 17, 2019
This was ok for me, but still enjoyable enough.
April 26, 2010
This was a great book! Still very soap operahish but an excellent plot!! Had me roped in right away. I was actually prepared to be disappointed cause this book got awful reviews, but apparently the people reading this book must not be familiar with Harlequin books cause if they were they would realize that this one was awesome!!
The book starts out with Fritzi waking up the morning after her wedding night, thinking about the great night she just had with her new husband David and looking forward to him waking so she could surprise him with the news of her pregnancy. She rolls over to discover him gone. She gets up and soon discovers that he has left and took EVERYTHING with him. Even the pictures she had framed of the two of them together sitting on the dresser.
Now it is a year later and she is raising her 6 month old baby boy, Malcolm, by herself with no word or trace of her husband David Frayne. His work building ended up being empty, and the marriage certificate a fake. The reverend and witness that married them, gone without a trace. There is absolutely no trace of a man named David Frayne. It's as if he never existed!
Since recently coming off maternity leave, Fritzi takes the substitute teaching job in Alaska to cover for her friend Hannah while she goes on a long honeymoon. Fritzi gets it in her head that David left because he was in danger. So she decides that the only way he would contact her was if she was far away from D.C. She posts an ad in the classifieds that reads,
"I still love you, David Frayne. I'm taking our son, Malcolm, to White Wolf Pass, Alaska. Come if you can. Always, Fritzi."
Hannah has her staying in her house and told the townspeople that Fritzi is married to a man named David who is a Government Bureaucrat who travels a lot. Hannah doesnt believe that Fritzi really ever got "married" but thinks she had a one night stand with some man while mourning her parents murder. (Father was a diplomat)Hannah leaves her with a well stocked kitchen and informs her that there is a .38 hidden in a kitchen cabinet just in case.
After a few days Fritzi starts to notice some things missing. Among the missing things, rice, soup, her father's knife with his initials engraved on the handle, and the gun. Then a few times she wakes in the middle of the night hearing creaks in the floorboards sounding like footsteps, and hearing her sons crib gently rocking. A couple times she got up and investigated but found nothing. Then one night, after a fellow teacher who lives not to far away tells her that she saw her husband has arrived and that she saw him a few times. Once in the bedroom late at night standing at the window looking out. So that night when she woke she concentrated on keeping her breathing slow and soft then sat up and called out David's name. He jumped back further into the shadows. She jumped to the lamp and turned it on and he smacked it sending it to shatter on the floor. Malcolm starts to cry and he hushes him with a single shush. Fritzi starts begging for explanations as to why he left. She starts crying asking him why he didn't love her anymore. That seemed to break him. He rushed to her and started kissing her passionately. When she tried to pull back the hood of his coat and touch his face he pulled back. She cried more, and he kissed her more. He never said a word. He just kissed her passionatly and touched her then laid her back on the bed like he was going to make love to her then pulled away and left. Even though Fritzi never saw him or heard his voice, she knew that it was David by the way he kissed her, touched her, caressed her.
The next day the Sheriff shows up telling Fritzi that a man carrying identity with her husbands name on it was found dead and that he needs to take her down to the morgue to identify the body. He then takes her and the baby dropping the baby on the way to the teacher friends house on the way to the morgue. At the morgue she sees the body and doesn't recognize the man. She tells them and they proceed to ask her questions about where her husband is if that man wasnt him. Then she admits that her husband was with her the night before, but she doesnt know where he is now. The Sheriff then tells her that the man was murdered with her knife (the initials) and that she is the only suspect and was being arrested and it would be decided by a jury of her peers whether or not she would be indited.
The next day during the indictment it was looking bad. So she finally confessed about how she married a man and how he left her in the middle of the night and she couldn't find any proof of his existence and that the marriage cert was a fake. They didn't believe her. They kept saying without her husband present to prove that she didn't kill him it was looing bad. Then a man in the back stood up and said "she was with me." and when asked who he was he said, "her husband" then she got a good look at him and didnt recognize him! He had an envelope and handed it to the sheriff and lawyer, to prove that he was her husband and father of Malcolm, then the pictures that had gone missing when David left were in there as well. Except the pics had her and this guy in them not David! He had all this doctored so that he could claim they were a family and yet she had no clue who this man was. He explained that his name was Nathan Lafarge and that he had abandoned her and Malcolm and he came here to get back on track and fix things with her. He said that her friend made up the name David for her husband cause she thought they would accept a teacher who was married better than single in a small conservative town like this being that she had a small baby and all. Then he pointed out that the sheriff was never actually told the last name of the made up husband and that it was just coincidence that an unknown man named David was killed out that way. Then he alibied her and they let her go once she finally stopped saying I never saw this man before in my life (no one believed her cause the documents looked so real and so did the pictures plus they all said that Malcolm looked just like Nathan) and finally said yes he is my husband and went along with it so that she could leave the station and be with her son.
She ends up being released to her "husband" Nathan Lefarge. It soon comes out that he was the man in her house the other night kissing her. She is still so scared of him and starting to think that he was the one to kill the man with Davids ID. So while driving back to the house from the station she tells him to stop at Abby's (the teacher who lives nearby) to pick up some of Malcolms things from her watching him the night before. He agrees and she goes in WITH Malcolm (against Nathans order to leave him in the truck) Minutes later he sees her skiing away from the house out the back. She ends up at the abandoned cabin that Nathan had been staying in and found all the things that had been taken from the house and then found an envelope with pictures of murdered victims and a police report from Washington DC. She takes it and stuffs it in her snowsuit and starts heading back to find the sheriff, hoping he will finally believe her and protect her and Malcolm from this stranger claiming to be her husband. She ends up falling and twisting her ankle really bad and face down in the snow. She feels hypothermia setting in and starts to realize she is about to die. Suddenly Nathan comes to her rescue. She loses consciousness and comes to back at Hannahs again and Nathan starting to undress her. She objects but loses consciousness again. She comes to again and this time she is just wearing her underwear and bra, and she hears him murmuring things that David used to murmur all the time. At this point I had figured it out that David and Nathan were in fact the same person. My radar was tuned in with the baby looking just like Nathan, and with him kissing just like David. But when the author pointed out that Nathan was saying phrases of assurances the same as David I knew.
Fritzi figured out when she finally gave into her attraction to Nathan an made love with him. As soon as they were done she went off on him. The first words out of her mouth were, "Damn you, David, I know it's you." He didn't deny it. He ended up telling her everything. He is a plastic surgeon for the government. When bad people make a deal with the government to turn over terrorists and assassins he would perform plastic surgery to give them a new face and the government would give them a new identity. One of the people he operated on decided to kill all the people who knew the new identity. You don't know anything except the original name and you assume the name Kris is a man but in the very end you find out it is a woman. She had killed the two government spooks in charge of her identity change and the nurse who assisted Nathan. Nathan would have been killed too had he been at his apartment that night and not at Fritz's townhouse. He fled when he got a dying phone call from the nurse and she warned him. He packed up after listening to her die and left leaving behind no trace of himself except his unborn child he knew nothing about. When he read the ad in the paper from Fritz, he went to Alaska to protect her. He hadn't intended to approach her, but he couldnt help it.
In the end after Kris the psycho died, Fritz, Nathan, and Malcolm go back to DC and get married for real. At the wedding, Nathan surprises Fritz with her parents who were alive all along but in witness protection program untill the terrorist group who tried to kill them was all arrested based on the testimony given by the late Kris. Happily ever after!
The book starts out with Fritzi waking up the morning after her wedding night, thinking about the great night she just had with her new husband David and looking forward to him waking so she could surprise him with the news of her pregnancy. She rolls over to discover him gone. She gets up and soon discovers that he has left and took EVERYTHING with him. Even the pictures she had framed of the two of them together sitting on the dresser.
Now it is a year later and she is raising her 6 month old baby boy, Malcolm, by herself with no word or trace of her husband David Frayne. His work building ended up being empty, and the marriage certificate a fake. The reverend and witness that married them, gone without a trace. There is absolutely no trace of a man named David Frayne. It's as if he never existed!
Since recently coming off maternity leave, Fritzi takes the substitute teaching job in Alaska to cover for her friend Hannah while she goes on a long honeymoon. Fritzi gets it in her head that David left because he was in danger. So she decides that the only way he would contact her was if she was far away from D.C. She posts an ad in the classifieds that reads,
"I still love you, David Frayne. I'm taking our son, Malcolm, to White Wolf Pass, Alaska. Come if you can. Always, Fritzi."
Hannah has her staying in her house and told the townspeople that Fritzi is married to a man named David who is a Government Bureaucrat who travels a lot. Hannah doesnt believe that Fritzi really ever got "married" but thinks she had a one night stand with some man while mourning her parents murder. (Father was a diplomat)Hannah leaves her with a well stocked kitchen and informs her that there is a .38 hidden in a kitchen cabinet just in case.
After a few days Fritzi starts to notice some things missing. Among the missing things, rice, soup, her father's knife with his initials engraved on the handle, and the gun. Then a few times she wakes in the middle of the night hearing creaks in the floorboards sounding like footsteps, and hearing her sons crib gently rocking. A couple times she got up and investigated but found nothing. Then one night, after a fellow teacher who lives not to far away tells her that she saw her husband has arrived and that she saw him a few times. Once in the bedroom late at night standing at the window looking out. So that night when she woke she concentrated on keeping her breathing slow and soft then sat up and called out David's name. He jumped back further into the shadows. She jumped to the lamp and turned it on and he smacked it sending it to shatter on the floor. Malcolm starts to cry and he hushes him with a single shush. Fritzi starts begging for explanations as to why he left. She starts crying asking him why he didn't love her anymore. That seemed to break him. He rushed to her and started kissing her passionately. When she tried to pull back the hood of his coat and touch his face he pulled back. She cried more, and he kissed her more. He never said a word. He just kissed her passionatly and touched her then laid her back on the bed like he was going to make love to her then pulled away and left. Even though Fritzi never saw him or heard his voice, she knew that it was David by the way he kissed her, touched her, caressed her.
The next day the Sheriff shows up telling Fritzi that a man carrying identity with her husbands name on it was found dead and that he needs to take her down to the morgue to identify the body. He then takes her and the baby dropping the baby on the way to the teacher friends house on the way to the morgue. At the morgue she sees the body and doesn't recognize the man. She tells them and they proceed to ask her questions about where her husband is if that man wasnt him. Then she admits that her husband was with her the night before, but she doesnt know where he is now. The Sheriff then tells her that the man was murdered with her knife (the initials) and that she is the only suspect and was being arrested and it would be decided by a jury of her peers whether or not she would be indited.
The next day during the indictment it was looking bad. So she finally confessed about how she married a man and how he left her in the middle of the night and she couldn't find any proof of his existence and that the marriage cert was a fake. They didn't believe her. They kept saying without her husband present to prove that she didn't kill him it was looing bad. Then a man in the back stood up and said "she was with me." and when asked who he was he said, "her husband" then she got a good look at him and didnt recognize him! He had an envelope and handed it to the sheriff and lawyer, to prove that he was her husband and father of Malcolm, then the pictures that had gone missing when David left were in there as well. Except the pics had her and this guy in them not David! He had all this doctored so that he could claim they were a family and yet she had no clue who this man was. He explained that his name was Nathan Lafarge and that he had abandoned her and Malcolm and he came here to get back on track and fix things with her. He said that her friend made up the name David for her husband cause she thought they would accept a teacher who was married better than single in a small conservative town like this being that she had a small baby and all. Then he pointed out that the sheriff was never actually told the last name of the made up husband and that it was just coincidence that an unknown man named David was killed out that way. Then he alibied her and they let her go once she finally stopped saying I never saw this man before in my life (no one believed her cause the documents looked so real and so did the pictures plus they all said that Malcolm looked just like Nathan) and finally said yes he is my husband and went along with it so that she could leave the station and be with her son.
She ends up being released to her "husband" Nathan Lefarge. It soon comes out that he was the man in her house the other night kissing her. She is still so scared of him and starting to think that he was the one to kill the man with Davids ID. So while driving back to the house from the station she tells him to stop at Abby's (the teacher who lives nearby) to pick up some of Malcolms things from her watching him the night before. He agrees and she goes in WITH Malcolm (against Nathans order to leave him in the truck) Minutes later he sees her skiing away from the house out the back. She ends up at the abandoned cabin that Nathan had been staying in and found all the things that had been taken from the house and then found an envelope with pictures of murdered victims and a police report from Washington DC. She takes it and stuffs it in her snowsuit and starts heading back to find the sheriff, hoping he will finally believe her and protect her and Malcolm from this stranger claiming to be her husband. She ends up falling and twisting her ankle really bad and face down in the snow. She feels hypothermia setting in and starts to realize she is about to die. Suddenly Nathan comes to her rescue. She loses consciousness and comes to back at Hannahs again and Nathan starting to undress her. She objects but loses consciousness again. She comes to again and this time she is just wearing her underwear and bra, and she hears him murmuring things that David used to murmur all the time. At this point I had figured it out that David and Nathan were in fact the same person. My radar was tuned in with the baby looking just like Nathan, and with him kissing just like David. But when the author pointed out that Nathan was saying phrases of assurances the same as David I knew.
Fritzi figured out when she finally gave into her attraction to Nathan an made love with him. As soon as they were done she went off on him. The first words out of her mouth were, "Damn you, David, I know it's you." He didn't deny it. He ended up telling her everything. He is a plastic surgeon for the government. When bad people make a deal with the government to turn over terrorists and assassins he would perform plastic surgery to give them a new face and the government would give them a new identity. One of the people he operated on decided to kill all the people who knew the new identity. You don't know anything except the original name and you assume the name Kris is a man but in the very end you find out it is a woman. She had killed the two government spooks in charge of her identity change and the nurse who assisted Nathan. Nathan would have been killed too had he been at his apartment that night and not at Fritz's townhouse. He fled when he got a dying phone call from the nurse and she warned him. He packed up after listening to her die and left leaving behind no trace of himself except his unborn child he knew nothing about. When he read the ad in the paper from Fritz, he went to Alaska to protect her. He hadn't intended to approach her, but he couldnt help it.
In the end after Kris the psycho died, Fritz, Nathan, and Malcolm go back to DC and get married for real. At the wedding, Nathan surprises Fritz with her parents who were alive all along but in witness protection program untill the terrorist group who tried to kill them was all arrested based on the testimony given by the late Kris. Happily ever after!
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 17, 2024
It was very interesting to read.
July 11, 2016
I can’t, in good conscience, recommend this book to anyone. Not even to Harlequin fans! Now, I admit that I don’t read many Harlequin books….in fact, I can’t remember the last time I read one…. but this one was pretty bad. There are a few spoilers ahead, but since I don’t think you should read this, it doesn’t matter, right?
I didn’t like Fritzi at all. Her name should have been Ditzi. She was a very poor decision maker, beginning with her decision to take her baby to Alaska in the middle of winter and let’s not forget running off in the middle of a snowstorm to meet some stranger, whose only contact with her is a single phone call, in an empty schoolhouse. David/Nathan didn’t come off as particularly noble. I rolled my eyes so much in the first 100 pages that I almost didn’t finish it. But by the time Fritzi was arrested on the spot for the murder of “David Frayne”, despite very little evidence (a knife she says was stolen), and then was put in front of an “investigative jury” the next day before being released because some guy comes in and says he’s married to her and she was with him, and hey! they all believe *his* alibi!…. well, by that time it was a train wreck I couldn’t look away from. It smoothed out a little in the middle, when they actually got to the romance part (which there actually was very little of in the book), but fell apart completely at the end again. Ms. McBride should stick to the romance and leave the suspense to those who actually know what they’re doing.
So thank you J.Kaye, for offering me the opportunity to guest review this! It’s made me appreciate the good romance I’ve read even more! :-)
I didn’t like Fritzi at all. Her name should have been Ditzi. She was a very poor decision maker, beginning with her decision to take her baby to Alaska in the middle of winter and let’s not forget running off in the middle of a snowstorm to meet some stranger, whose only contact with her is a single phone call, in an empty schoolhouse. David/Nathan didn’t come off as particularly noble. I rolled my eyes so much in the first 100 pages that I almost didn’t finish it. But by the time Fritzi was arrested on the spot for the murder of “David Frayne”, despite very little evidence (a knife she says was stolen), and then was put in front of an “investigative jury” the next day before being released because some guy comes in and says he’s married to her and she was with him, and hey! they all believe *his* alibi!…. well, by that time it was a train wreck I couldn’t look away from. It smoothed out a little in the middle, when they actually got to the romance part (which there actually was very little of in the book), but fell apart completely at the end again. Ms. McBride should stick to the romance and leave the suspense to those who actually know what they’re doing.
So thank you J.Kaye, for offering me the opportunity to guest review this! It’s made me appreciate the good romance I’ve read even more! :-)
September 13, 2013
Liked the idea behind this book but I have to say it was Mediocre at best. I think the author would have been a bit better off if she hadn't flipped her female character's attitude to the male lead so quickly.
December 5, 2013
OMG, the female lead (just can't call her a heroine) was absolutely TSTL! Dumber than a box of rocks, heck dumber than the box. Every decision she made was the wrong one. It's books/leads like this that give Harlequin the bad rep.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews