A woman's seemingly idyllic life comes to a crashing halt when her husband dies on the Caribbean island of St. John, where she and her children discover his shocking secret—the other family he has managed to hide.
As she does in her books set on Nantucket, Hilderbrand...excels at establishing a setting (the food! the luxury! the sea turtles!) that will inspire wanderlust. This first book in a planned trilogy ends with unanswered questions, but, with engaging characters on a picturesque island, this is the perfect escape.
As usual, Hilderbrand’s characters are as familiar as old friends, and her smooth prose is as tender and welcoming. The questions surrounding Russ’s death and double life provide suspense, and readers will be happy to lose themselves in paradise while getting to know these irresistible new characters.
We learn a great deal about the characters' pasts, but little light is shed on the shocking secret at the core of the book, and suspicions raised about Russ Steele's business dealings and the details of the helicopter crash are also left unresolved. Perhaps further volumes of the planned trilogy will tackle all this, but it's a lot to leave up in the air. The island setting and characters are done in classic Hilderbrand style, but the balance of backstory to resolution seems off.
