Custody
A Novel
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
A secret in a woman’s past returns to change her life forever in this riveting novel from New York Times bestselling author Nancy Thayer.
Ambitious, brilliant, and engaged to a wonderful guy, Kelly MacLeod feels like her dreams are coming true when she lands a prestigious appointment as a judge in the Massachusetts Family Court. A passionate advocate on behalf of children of divorce, she can at long last put her fierce intellect to good use in the courtroom.
But a chance meeting with a charismatic man forever changes Kelly’s life. Randall Madison is a successful doctor locked in a custody battle with his soon-to-be ex-wife. The two are soon swept into a passionate affair. But then Kelly realizes that a secret ties her inextricably to Randall’s case, and she finds herself torn between her moral judgment and her deepest desires.
Includes a captivating excerpt of Nancy Thayer’s novel Nantucket Sisters!
Praise for the novels of Nancy Thayer
“The queen of beach books.”—The Star-Ledger
“Thayer has a deep and masterly understanding of love and friendship, of where the two complement and where they collide.”—Elin Hilderbrand
“Thayer’s gift for reaching the emotional core of her characters [is] captivating.”—Houston Chronicle
“One of my favorite writers.”—Susan Wiggs
“Thayer portrays beautifully the small moments, inside stories and shared histories that build families.”—The Miami Herald
“Thayer’s sense of place is powerful, and her words are hung together the way my grandmother used to tat lace.”—Dorothea Benton Frank
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Women who like to read about other women's troubles will enjoy Thayer's 14th novel (after Three Women at the Water's Edge; An Act of Love; etc.), which features a novice family court judge confronting a family melodrama of her own. Just as Kelly McLeod is appointed to the Massachusetts Probate and Family Court bench, she meets and falls in love with a man whose life proves as complicated by past mistakes and present entanglements as her own. Randall Madison is battling his controlling soon-to-be ex-wife (a frigid registered nurse running for political office) for custody of their 12-year-old daughter, Tessa. Curious about her birth (she was born to a surrogate mother) and on the cusp of puberty, Tessa needs all the parenting she can get. Randall also must deal with his aging widowed father and a former lover who won't let him go quietly. Kelly is engaged to a wealthy lawyer she doesn't want to marry and must cope with her half-sister, a difficult teenager who is the daughter of Kelly's long-estranged, now-dead mother and the stepfather responsible for that estrangement. Thayer turns Kelly's easy-to-guess secret into the basis of an often engrossing tale, meticulously detailing along the way the web of court procedures developed to handle family conflicts and explaining how conflicts get resolved despite their uncomfortable fit with those procedures. Ingenuity at tackling first the court case and then Tessa's unhappy situation turns Kelly from a run-of-the-mill modern heroine into a model of negotiation. Thayer's view that motherhood requires eternal patience and parenthood an unending supply of time and money imbues the book with her trademark compassionate realism.
