By Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan

We put on our Pleasant Walking Faces as we entered the museum through its gift shop, before switching to our Pleasant Greeting Faces as we shook hands with the gallery director.

What with the holidays and my mission to look at every Christmas TV movie ever made, It took me forever to finish this book. Meanwhile, I had developed a hankering to read one of my favorite author’s still unread backlist books so I tried to skip ahead but whenever I came back to it, it just wouldn’t let me do that. That’s a sign of a good book. It was just as good as The Royal We, I thought. The two authors have a real knack for patterning their fictional characters with enough verisimilitude in their personality and situations and events that it gives the reader a sense of being behind closed doors. At the same time, they put the characters in fresh and fascinating situations and dilemmas. Yet I never thought, “Oh that could never happen!” It is very well written, if a bit too long, with lots of intrigue, romance, humor, a mystery, and a shocking development that leads to some suspense. The book is chock-full of characters and it’s hard to keep them all straight. Their nemesis does not get any comeuppance. And one intriguing character from the last book does not make an appearance. Maybe a setup for a third novel? This one ends with everything tied up pretty neatly though, which I very much appreciated. 

January 1, 2021