This title is available on Amazon in paperback, hardcover, Kindle, or audiobook formats. It’s also available at your local library through the Libby App. The audiobook, published September 17, 2024, is narrated by Julia Whelan. Publishers describe the book as a combination of soulful suspense and evocative family drama, labeling it a thriller and a riveting page-turner. It also depicts an epic love story. Fair warning, the suspense is lacking. The family drama is in spades, and it is assuredly not a page-turner. Dave’s pacing for the word thriller doesn’t fit. The story moves as slowly as molasses in winter. As for the love story, Dave buried it in bits and pieces, reminding readers and listeners of mythical monsters being drawn and quartered and their remains being scattered to every corner of the earth. Not really stuff epic love stories are made of.

Hotel magnate Liam Noone is three times divorced and remains friendly with his three ex-wives. He is a very involved father to his three children: Nora, Sam, and Tommy, and he loves them all to the best of his ability. Nora, he’s had to love her from afar as he often spends his time at his cliffside cottage ‘Windbreak’ on the California coast, and she lives in Brooklyn, and unlike his twin boys, she doesn’t want anything to do with his company. And it’s at Windbreak that Liam falls to his death, even though the authorities rule it accidental. Nora and her half-brother Sam believe otherwise and embark on a journey to discover what really happened that night.

The book revolves around the night Liam died and a secret he has kept for over fifty years, with the timeline alternating between the present and the past. Nora narrates the present, and Liam shows readers and listeners the past through his eyes. It’s in these bits and pieces that the epic romance is introduced, but it’s sorely underdeveloped to the point of being unconvincing. Dave would have been better off focusing her efforts on the other plots, such as Nora’s relationship issues which only derailed readers away from the main plot and did not move it forward, Sam’s mid-life crisis and problems with his twin Tommy which remained unsolved, the secret negotiations for the sell of the company and Uncle Joe’s relationship with the potential buyer of the company, and accusations flying left and right. The family drama, the connections between the siblings, and the uncle would have been more beneficial to the readers and listeners instead of the superficial, nonsensical relationship between Liam and this woman, which just seemed to be going around in circles. Perhaps then it would have provided a proper insight into the characters, as it is, Dave only gave us two-dimensional views without adding any depth.

The lack of drive, poor character development, and the snail’s pace for something coined as a riveting page-turner made this a disappointing 2-star listen.