Redemption

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY JUL 14, 2003

When Frances Pratt, formerly of the Suffolk County (New York) DA's office, returns for her cousin's wedding to the tony Massachusetts town where she spent childhood summers, she expects a somewhat stuffy weekend but then Hope Lawrence, the beautiful, bulimic and troubled bride, doesn't show up at the altar. Frances, who's now the president of the Long Island Coalition Against Domestic Violence, finds Hope hanging from a light fixture, an apparent suicide. Frances isn't convinced, however, so she teams up with the good-natured but tough cop Elvis Mallory to find out the truth. There are suspects aplenty: Hope's jealous half-sister, her violent ex-boyfriend (with whom Hope was still intimate) and her fianc 's snooty parents, who opposed the marriage. Meanwhile, Hope's own parents harbor a long-buried secret, and the local minister, who was Hope's confidante, has mysterious connections to events as well. The story is a familiar one, competently if not elegantly told through multiple viewpoints. In her second gumshoe outing (after 2001's Misfortune), Frances once again plays the career woman exposing the dirty secrets of the moneyed classes, but Geary's evocations of buttoned-up privilege ("We're WASPs, remember? We don't talk about problems") fails to go beyond glancing and superficial. Fanny's affair with her sweet, potato-farming next-door neighbor offers a break from all the whodunit speculation, but these interludes are few and far between. Poor Hope may be the most interesting character here, in part for her troubles and in part for her necessary silence, which lends her a kind of dignity that many of the other characters lack. New England author tour.