THE
PLOT:
Carolyn
Reynolds’ health problems force her to sell her wildly successful company to
avoid scandal if the truth comes out. Her mother’s tragic hit-and-run death
plus day-to-day business pressures have overwhelmed her. Her aunts’ solution to
relieve Carolyn’s maladies only make matters worse. The dilapidated fixer-upper
mansion, Cass, Muriel, and Bee, gift her only comes with more stress-filled
problems.
First,
two scared teenaged vagrants with a baby with nowhere else to go add to meeting
the other two lot owners: an ex-con contractor trying to get the job to rebuild
Bayshore and a pastor trying to lessen Carolyn’s problems. Despite initial
reservations, Carolyn comes to care about them all, as her own past comes back
to haunt her. Her search for her mother’s killer has led someone to renew a
dangerous interest in Carolyn’s life.
The
two other Bayshore tenants have their own problems. Contractor Shealds Jackson
hopes to prove he’s really a good man after a stint in prison tarred his name.
Pastor Peter Allred aims to move on from a violent incident in his past. Both
men will grow closer to Carolyn as murder and mayhem threaten to destroy, not
rebuild, their lives.
About the Author:
Donna
J. Grisanti made her debut as a published novelist in 2006 with Wandering Hearts. A former senior
nursing administrator, she now divides her time between writing, family, and
church. She lives in Tucson, Arizona.
Review:
I
wanted to like 39 Bayshore, but it
didn’t quite grab me that way I thought it should. The preface begins with a
murder in Los Angeles, and then chapter one takes the reader to Maryland, and
the murder in the preface is not addressed again for quite awhile. The book is also full of
mixed tenses, misused words, and messy point-of-view changes (“head-hops”),
sometimes in the middle of a paragraph. And I found the pacing very slow.
After
about the fourth chapter, I was ready to just cut my losses and put it aside,
but I cared about the characters enough to want to see what happened to them.
So I did something I rarely do—I went to the back of the book to read the
ending, and found characters who had not yet been introduced. Well, that didn’t
work. Fortunately, I’d bookmarked the place where I’d left off, so I returned
and read the rest, kvetching at the bad grammar and head-hops all the way
through.
The
copy I read was an advanced review copy, so some of the problems I found may
have been fixed before publication. But I highly doubt the author fixed the
fact that she started the book with a murder and then dropped it completely
until much later.
Warnings: None
Length: 342 Pages
Prices:
Print: $12.99
Digital: $6.99
Thanks
for visiting.
