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Dead Ringer
Charlotte Gray's world has been turned upside down. Her husband of six months has disappeared, and now FBI agents inform her that Dan, the love of her life, is a wanted international terrorist.
But before Charlotte has a chance to absorb their shocking revelation, a dangerous chain of events completely shatters her perceptions of good and evil. Kidnapped by a mysterious stranger, she is warned that things are not what they seem, and that the true danger lies deep within the most trusted of places. But Charlotte is not afraid. She is furious. She will escape, and she will get even...
But before Charlotte has a chance to absorb their shocking revelation, a dangerous chain of events completely shatters her perceptions of good and evil. Kidnapped by a mysterious stranger, she is warned that things are not what they seem, and that the true danger lies deep within the most trusted of places. But Charlotte is not afraid. She is furious. She will escape, and she will get even...
400 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published May 1, 2003
10 people are currently reading
110 people want to read
About the author
Jasmine Cresswell
115 books54 followersBorn in England, Jasmine Cresswell now divides her time between her winter home in Sarasota, Florida and her summer home in Evergreen, Colorado. Jasmine has been writing since 1975 and has published over 50 novels, with 9 million copies of her books in print.
Jasmine served for two years as the editor of the Romance Writer's Report. She also served as president of Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers, and is a founder and former president of Novelists, Inc. She received the Colorado Authors' League Award for Best Paperback Novel of the Year and the Romance Writers of America Golden Rose Award. Her books also have received numerous Romantic Times certificates of excellence.
Experienced as a public speaker, Jasmine has conducted college seminars and addressed many writers' conferences. Interviews and profiles have appeared in newspapers throughout the country, and Jasmine considers herself a veteran of talk shows and news broadcasts.
Married to Malcolm Candlish, whom she met while she was working for the British Embassy in Rio de Janeiro, Jasmine and her husband have lived all over the world. She has a Bachelor's Degree with a double major in history and philosophy from Melbourne University, a second degree in history from Macquarie University, as well as a Masters Degree in history and archival administration from Case Western Reserve University in Ohio.
Jasmine served for two years as the editor of the Romance Writer's Report. She also served as president of Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers, and is a founder and former president of Novelists, Inc. She received the Colorado Authors' League Award for Best Paperback Novel of the Year and the Romance Writers of America Golden Rose Award. Her books also have received numerous Romantic Times certificates of excellence.
Experienced as a public speaker, Jasmine has conducted college seminars and addressed many writers' conferences. Interviews and profiles have appeared in newspapers throughout the country, and Jasmine considers herself a veteran of talk shows and news broadcasts.
Married to Malcolm Candlish, whom she met while she was working for the British Embassy in Rio de Janeiro, Jasmine and her husband have lived all over the world. She has a Bachelor's Degree with a double major in history and philosophy from Melbourne University, a second degree in history from Macquarie University, as well as a Masters Degree in history and archival administration from Case Western Reserve University in Ohio.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
September 5, 2012
I had to push myself to finish this book. It felt like a large amount of time was spent on explaining too much stuff that did not interest me. Government/political subjects are not my thing in books. If you happen to like the government/political scene then maybe this would be better suited for you.
July 16, 2015
started out great, good plot line, then it got really kind of ridiculous. turns out its a romancy thriller. was ok.
November 1, 2024
This was nearly another DNF...but I managed to finish it after setting it aside for a few days.
As with any of the books I pick up, the plot sounded interesting: A woman's husband disappears and she is informed he's a wanted terrorist. Add in the "kidnapped by a stranger" trope and I was all in for a romantic adventure I could sink my teeth into! Alas...it was not anything like I imagined.
The main problem I had with this book began on page 1 with the prologue. Instead of "showing" us how Charlotte and her husband felt about each other, and maybe giving us a peek inside their relationship, we are "told" everything in a distanced way. "They did this, they did that. They drove home. They loved each other."
This may have been something I could overlook since it was the prologue, but chapter 1 was written basically the same way, as is the rest of the book. Most of what the characters "feel" is told to us, not described in a way that pulls us into the emotions of each person.
As a reader, my preference is to read character-driven stories, ones where we feel what the h and H are feeling because their emotions are written in such vivid words! I don't want to be told "she was sad", I want to feel the depths of her emotions so I can understand her reactions during the story.
Instead, Dead Ringer transitions from the prologue where we were told that Charlotte knew Dan for a very short time, into chapter 1 where she goes straight into a full-blown emotional breakdown after he vanishes.
Since we weren't privy to her inner feelings about Dan, her reaction felt very much like an overreaction to me. Instead of worrying a little, she starts screaming hysterically in the street. And by the time the cops show up she's an emotional wreck, imagining everything from Dan being kidnapped to lying in the street dead somewhere. Again...this felt waaay overblown.
Another aspect of Charlotte's character that I just didn't mesh with is that she fluctuated wildly between being emotionally constipated to being wildly vindictive or aggressive. In her little emotional outbursts (usually about her ex, or the man who kidnapped her) she thinks such off-kilter things as wanting to send them to the moon or personally kill them. This seemed so off-the-wall that it didn't line up with the meek little "small-town" woman that she was supposed to be.
So ok, we got off to a bad start. But it's bound to get better right? After all, the synopsis says "before she can absorb this shocking revelation (that Dan was a wanted terrorist) ... she's kidnapped by a stranger." (I paraphrased that last part).
Ummm, here's where the book lost me again...unless the author meant it took Charlotte a year and a half to absorb the shock, the synopsis lied...because instead of anything exciting happening following the news of Dan's real identity, we skip forward 1.5 years later 🤔
There we find that Charlotte has completely changed. She's moved away from Iowa, quit her job, lives like a nun, and feels emotionally numb. But again, none of this felt realistic since all we had to go on was the fact that she'd a) barely known Dan for a year, b) married him after knowing him only 6 months, and c) discovered she, in fact, knew even less about him than she thought when the FBI told her who he was.
None of that added up to our heroine being shocked and emotionally distraught to the point of turning her life upside-down and blockading any and all emotions. Especially since at this point, she's been upset longer than her entirety of knowing Dan in the first place. 🤷♀️
I wish I could say that the suspense aspect of this book was good, but there again it fell flat.
Starting during the investigation into Dan's disappearance, we get these long, overdrawn conversations about FBI procedure, and elaborate reasons why someone is doing something, complete with excusing other possibilities of things they could have done.
This quickly kills any tension. Instead, we are bored to death learning about tedious aspects that do nothing to move the plot along or keep us engaged in the story. This tension/pacing killer continued every time I thought we were finally getting somewhere. 🥱 Our hero seemed to agree when after a longwinded conversation he said this: "We've spent too long talking and we need to get out of here."
That brings me to another little item that I was a little confused about. I couldn't tell if I was supposed to know that It seemed pretty clear to me early on, but it wasn't expressly stated until waaay later when Charlotte finds out. So if that was supposed to be a big plot twist or surprise, umm, it wasn't. 🤷♀️ Either way, it could have been written either more veiled so we as readers didn't figure it out, or should have stated much earlier and clearer that we were supposed to know all along.
As with any of the books I pick up, the plot sounded interesting: A woman's husband disappears and she is informed he's a wanted terrorist. Add in the "kidnapped by a stranger" trope and I was all in for a romantic adventure I could sink my teeth into! Alas...it was not anything like I imagined.
The main problem I had with this book began on page 1 with the prologue. Instead of "showing" us how Charlotte and her husband felt about each other, and maybe giving us a peek inside their relationship, we are "told" everything in a distanced way. "They did this, they did that. They drove home. They loved each other."
This may have been something I could overlook since it was the prologue, but chapter 1 was written basically the same way, as is the rest of the book. Most of what the characters "feel" is told to us, not described in a way that pulls us into the emotions of each person.
As a reader, my preference is to read character-driven stories, ones where we feel what the h and H are feeling because their emotions are written in such vivid words! I don't want to be told "she was sad", I want to feel the depths of her emotions so I can understand her reactions during the story.
Instead, Dead Ringer transitions from the prologue where we were told that Charlotte knew Dan for a very short time, into chapter 1 where she goes straight into a full-blown emotional breakdown after he vanishes.
Since we weren't privy to her inner feelings about Dan, her reaction felt very much like an overreaction to me. Instead of worrying a little, she starts screaming hysterically in the street. And by the time the cops show up she's an emotional wreck, imagining everything from Dan being kidnapped to lying in the street dead somewhere. Again...this felt waaay overblown.
Another aspect of Charlotte's character that I just didn't mesh with is that she fluctuated wildly between being emotionally constipated to being wildly vindictive or aggressive. In her little emotional outbursts (usually about her ex, or the man who kidnapped her) she thinks such off-kilter things as wanting to send them to the moon or personally kill them. This seemed so off-the-wall that it didn't line up with the meek little "small-town" woman that she was supposed to be.
So ok, we got off to a bad start. But it's bound to get better right? After all, the synopsis says "before she can absorb this shocking revelation (that Dan was a wanted terrorist) ... she's kidnapped by a stranger." (I paraphrased that last part).
Ummm, here's where the book lost me again...unless the author meant it took Charlotte a year and a half to absorb the shock, the synopsis lied...because instead of anything exciting happening following the news of Dan's real identity, we skip forward 1.5 years later 🤔
There we find that Charlotte has completely changed. She's moved away from Iowa, quit her job, lives like a nun, and feels emotionally numb. But again, none of this felt realistic since all we had to go on was the fact that she'd a) barely known Dan for a year, b) married him after knowing him only 6 months, and c) discovered she, in fact, knew even less about him than she thought when the FBI told her who he was.
None of that added up to our heroine being shocked and emotionally distraught to the point of turning her life upside-down and blockading any and all emotions. Especially since at this point, she's been upset longer than her entirety of knowing Dan in the first place. 🤷♀️
I wish I could say that the suspense aspect of this book was good, but there again it fell flat.
Starting during the investigation into Dan's disappearance, we get these long, overdrawn conversations about FBI procedure, and elaborate reasons why someone is doing something, complete with excusing other possibilities of things they could have done.
This quickly kills any tension. Instead, we are bored to death learning about tedious aspects that do nothing to move the plot along or keep us engaged in the story. This tension/pacing killer continued every time I thought we were finally getting somewhere. 🥱 Our hero seemed to agree when after a longwinded conversation he said this: "We've spent too long talking and we need to get out of here."
That brings me to another little item that I was a little confused about. I couldn't tell if I was supposed to know that It seemed pretty clear to me early on, but it wasn't expressly stated until waaay later when Charlotte finds out. So if that was supposed to be a big plot twist or surprise, umm, it wasn't. 🤷♀️ Either way, it could have been written either more veiled so we as readers didn't figure it out, or should have stated much earlier and clearer that we were supposed to know all along.
August 29, 2019
The first novel I've read by this author and I can't wait to explore more of her writing! The book has been on my "to read" shelves for a long time and now I can't understand what took me so long to explore the offering.
It's a page-turning thriller and with a copyright date of 2003 it seems even more creative to be written before the word "terrorist" was part of our nation's daily headlines and daily vocabulary. For anyone who has been deceived by the partner he/she married this captures the innermost feelings of betrayal, guilt, and the aftereffects to his/her self-confidence. Charlotte has been told by the FBI that the man she married and dearly loves is an international terrorist and at Christmas when emotions always seem closer to the surface. So begins twists and turns that I never saw coming on the next page or pages and I couldn't stop reading!
It's a page-turning thriller and with a copyright date of 2003 it seems even more creative to be written before the word "terrorist" was part of our nation's daily headlines and daily vocabulary. For anyone who has been deceived by the partner he/she married this captures the innermost feelings of betrayal, guilt, and the aftereffects to his/her self-confidence. Charlotte has been told by the FBI that the man she married and dearly loves is an international terrorist and at Christmas when emotions always seem closer to the surface. So begins twists and turns that I never saw coming on the next page or pages and I couldn't stop reading!
May 30, 2022
This started out good, but then went downhill. There were long stretches of nothing but dialogue, about terrorists, fighting for Ireland, the political climate, etc. And the title totally did not fit the book. A dead ringer is someone who looks just like someone else. There was not a single character in this book who fit that description. Instead one of the main characters was someone who had completely changed his appearance so that even his own wife did not recognize him. I thought this would be a romantic suspense story (I mean, it says on the spine "Romantic Suspense"). Instead it was slow moving and slightly boring.
May 10, 2020
Charlotte's husband goes to put out the garbage and never returns. What has happened to him?
Has he been kidnapped or met with foul play. She calls the police who have no evidence to suggest anything but he just decided to leave.
This book is full of twists and turns as Charolotte tries to discover who her husband really is. Do we really know the people around us?
This is a good book.
Has he been kidnapped or met with foul play. She calls the police who have no evidence to suggest anything but he just decided to leave.
This book is full of twists and turns as Charolotte tries to discover who her husband really is. Do we really know the people around us?
This is a good book.
June 18, 2021
The book started out good, unfortunately it didn't last. The ending wasn't bad, it did pick up with a good ending.
October 17, 2020
A good film material.
Read
February 13, 2016An almost great book. Promising plot, but way too predictable. The author has a simple, familiar way of getting her points across. Her facts on military operatives are pretty impressive too. I would give it a 2.5 out of 5 rating.
March 9, 2009
A great romantic suspense. Had me going til the end!
June 29, 2009
A highly-addicting tale with the right amounts of action, romance, and suspense. I enjoyed reading this immensely as Cresswell - yet again - doesn't disappoint. Recommended. 5/5 stars.
June 8, 2015
Way to predictable... Only read it cuz it was on the book shelf.. Would have to be a real page turner if I were to read another by her...
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews