Summer at the Lake
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
For childhood friends Leo Kelly, Jane Devlin, and newly ordained "Packy" Keenan, the summers they spent at the lake together were times of pure magic. And no summer was more enchanting than the summer of 1948 - until a tragic car wreck killed two of their friends.
The rich and prominent "Old House" families of Chicago banded together to protect their own - the driver, who was drunk, was the son of a local doctor. There was a cover-up and a vicious scandal. Leo left for the Korean War, and the three friends' summers at the lake were gone forever. . .
Until thirty years later when Leo, still obsessed by the memory of Jane and the need to solve the mystery of what really happened that fateful summer, comes back to Chicago and back to the lake.
Jane is more beautiful than ever, but her life has been an unhappy one, trapped in a loveless marriage and haunted by the memory of Leo. She has returned to the lake to try to piece her life back together.
Disillusioned with the priesthood, Packy realizes he's in love with Jane, too. But as a best friend and confidant to Leo and Jane, he faces a difficult choice this summer: should he help his oldest friend win back the woman of his dreams or pursue what might be his own last chance for love?
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Despite having more than 30 novels under his clerical collar (many of them bestsellers), Greeley shows no signs of slowing down. His new romantic thriller is replete with his trademark steamy sex, complicated relationships and left-leaning church politics. The story opens when the three alternating narrators--childhood friends Leo, Jane and the recently ordained Patrick ("Packy")--return, separately or by chance, to the scene of the car accident that wrenched them apart from each other. Thirty years earlier, two of their friends died and half a million dollars disappeared when their speeding LaSalle crashed into a tree and incinerated. The lives of all three have been unknowingly manipulated by undercurrents of treachery, resulting from class and ethnic jealousies among the wealthy Irish and Italian immigrants who have inherited the "sprawling Victorian homes with their gables and turrets and porches and balconies" of their native Chicago suburb. The rivalries run deep as Leo and the sexually liberal Father Packy both rediscover their passion for the newly divorced Jane. Can Leo uncover the truth about the crash without jeopardizing their friendship and his chances of love with Jane, postponed for three decades? Some readers may be offended by the book's frank treatment of sex (a priest who links Christian caritas with sexual desire) or the Catholic lovers' none-too-subtle appropriation of religious terminology ("Super solemn high fuck"). But even lapsed Greeley devotees should be glad to find another novel cut from the good Father's customary cloth. Literary Guild, Doubleday Book Club and Mystery Guild selections.
