Woman in Red
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
A novel of a shattering loss, an act of revenge, and a quest for redemption from the New York Times–bestselling author of Garden of Lies.
Alice Kessler has lived through a mother’s worst nightmare. While riding his bike, her eight-year-old son, David, was killed by a drunk driver. Out of her mind with grief and rage—especially after losing the wrongful death suit—Alice runs down the driver, Owen White, crippling him. After serving nine years in prison, she returns to Grays Island in the Pacific Northwest, divorced and destitute, to reunite with her surviving son, Jeremy.
But the child she has not seen in almost a decade has become an angry teenager, and when Jeremy is falsely accused of rape, White, who is now mayor, seizes his chance for revenge.
To defend Jeremy, Alice seeks the help of former Manhattan DA Colin McGinty, who lost his wife on 9/11 and returned to Grays Island after the death of his grandfather—an artist famous for his haunting portrait Woman in Red. As the story of the painting is revealed, the past becomes intertwined with the present, and Alice and Colin discover that they are bound together by a deadly wartime secret on the verge of being exposed.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this page-turning novel, Alice Kessler, the married mother of two sons, is living on the fictional Grays Island, in the Pacific Northwest, when her eight-year-old son is run over while riding his bike. Alice is convinced the driver, Owen White, was drunk though her husband, Randy, is not. Neither is the court system. So, on the day Alice loses her wrongful death lawsuit, she runs Owen down in the courthouse parking lot, crippling but not killing him. Alice serves nine years and returns to the island near-broke and hoping to reunite with her surviving son, Jeremy, now 16. (Her husband, Randy, has divorced her.) At the same time, Colin McGinty, an ex-Manhattan prosecutor, has returned to his dead artist grandfather's island house after losing his wife in 9/11. Alice and Colin's fates become bound with a little help from Colin's inherited border collie and, more concretely, a portrait of Alice's grandmother. Cutting between WWII-era depictions of the lives of Colin's and Alice's grandparents and the melodramatic present (including Alice's son being accused of rape and Owen White's machinations as island mayor), haute-romance veteran Goudge (Immediate Family; Wish Come True; etc.) unspools a predictable yet satisfying tale of survival and redemption.
