We have reviewed some of Sydney Sheldon’s books earlier. In fact we have reviewed many of them. See Memories of Midnight or Tell Me Your Dreams just for two examples. Let us see what the story on this one is.
Leslie Stewarts is a PR and ad executive in Kentucky. She is beautiful and smart. She has Oliver Russell as a client. He is young, passionate and wants to be the governor of Kentucky. However, Leslie’s boss Jim Bailey says that whoever was funding him suddenly withdrew support and Oliver’s poll ratings were falling. He was relying on their office to pull him back up again – inexpensively, as now he does not have the funds.
Flashback: Leslie’s father, whom she adored, left her mother and moved in with a widow he had fallen in love with and Leslie realizes that he no longer cares for Leslie either.
As happens in Sydney Sheldon novels, she falls for him hard and without worrying about professional conflict, sleeps with him. When he at last proposes, her bliss seems to be complete. And as a long term reader of Sydney’s stories, you know exactly where this is headed.
And it happens, Oliver marries a senator’s daughter. The senator is Todd Davis and the daughter is Jan. Leslie hears of it from the press first and is stunned but she is grace itself in supporting Oliver’s choice. She even attends their wedding but she now knows that she is going to make his life a living hell from now on.
After a betrayal from her father (who moved away to marry his long time mistress abandoning Leslie and her mother) this was one betrayal too far.
She surprises Senator Todd by asking for an introduction to another press baron in Arizona. Puzzled, but seeing no harm, he makes the introductions by phone. That man, Henry Chambers, though old, falls for her and she marries him. First step of the plan for revenge completed.
She takes an interest in the newspaper and efficiently returns it to profit. Her husband dies and she slowly increases her empire, adding more newspapers and TV channels to become a media baron. Step One in her elaborate plan of revenge completed.
The story abruptly shifts to Dana Evans, who grew up moving from place to place in tow to her father, who was in the army. When she graduated in journalism, she got a job in a local newspaper and then graduated to the head quarters in the typical way Sheldon’s heroines do: getting things done dynamically and impressing the boss Matt. She rose in the organization to become a war zone television journalist.
Meanwhile, the plan of Senator Davis works and as the campaign (clandestinely) kicks into high gear, Oliver is being talked about as Presidential material and he is leading the polls of the possible candidates. He is sitting pretty. But Leslie is watching carefully.
Meanwhile, Dana is making a name for herself, winning syndication and several awards for her unusual reporting as well as looking after the orphaned kids in Sarajevo, a war torn region.
Olive, as expected becomes President and Davis is now happy that he has got a puppet in the White House.
The explosive comes when Leslie starts putting explosive headlines attacking President Oliver. Davis tries to get Oliver to seduce Leslie and offers his private mansion away from public glare. Oliver sleeps with her and then when he leaves, is convinced that Leslie has been neutralized. The next day’s headline shows a picture of the mansion with the caption ‘President’s Love Nest’.
Now this is unusual because in Sydney’s books, the woman still pines for her lost lover and has a huge change of heart when he comes back to her. Time and time again in earlier books. This one seems to be different
Meanwhile, Dana is arrested and deported from the balkan country, accused of being a spy. The deportation, not death, is the result of the efforts of the President and Tager, his Chief of Staff. She is reassigned as the White House correspondent and meets them. She also gets over her hangups for the Herzogovia issues and gets to know and like a fellow journalist, Jeff.
There is another girl who dies after taking Ecstacy, in a hotel room. Her boyfriend’s fingerprints are all over the room. However, he insists that he was not the killer. He was in her room but left before she died. The girl, Carole was just fifteen and was the daughter of the Governer of a state. The mother is devastated.
She had gone on a tour of the White House and when she went to the washroom, her boyfriend, who was her classmate and a fellow tourist of the White House, could see that she was excited. She told him that she was going to meet someone important in the fanciest suite of a fancy hotel in the town. The boyfriend visited her in the hotel but was booted out by the girl, Carole, as she was expecting someone to come and meet her in secret.
The police realize that she made one phone call on the day of the murder from the room : To the White House!
The killer remembers that she was given ecstasy and unexpectedly fell and hit her head and died. He quickly cleaned up the doorknob and goes out by the private elevator to his car, also wiping the buttons on the way out. Since he registered the room in cash under a false name and since he was careful not to touch any surfaces, he knows he cannot be tracked by the police. Still, it was a very close call.
When Leslie hears of the young girl’s murder and esctasy, she immediately remembers Oliver offering her Esctasy all those years ago and has a gut feel that this is her moment. She commissions a senior investigator to look into it and with ingenious methods and an informant (who is an old acquaintance who used to trade tips for money) who is the boyfriend of the telephone operator at the very hotel, hones in on the President being the prime suspect.
A blackmailer and then a reporter who are getting too close to the truth are murdered.
When finally Senator Davis finds out that Oliver will not listen to him about stopping the peace deal in the Middle East to help him and his buddies continue to sell arms to both sides, he turns against Oliver and makes a deal with Leslie to bring him down.
What follows are multiple twists, as you expect from a typical Sydney Sheldon book. I will leave the spoiler alerts out. This is an old book and so almost everyone who is interested in the author would have read it but in case you are tempted to read this on the basis of this review for the first time, I don’t want to spoil it for you. But a few comments.
You could see one of the twists coming from a mile away, if you have been reading Sheldon’s books regularly, as I have. In some ways, this book is also different. A jilted lover, a strong woman, also exists here. But there is another gitty woman too – Dana Evans. Still, in this case, the ending for one of the central characters is quite different from usual.
A taut story, enough twists and turns, surprises from the main characters in terms of what you would expect them to do (one of which is Oliver standing up for his principles in his Presidential term) all combine to make this one of Sydney Sheldon’s better books. Definitely worth a read, if you are a fan of his type of thrillers.
7/10
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