Emmy Lou Pagan is on the lam. When she was 16, she was convicted of a murder she didn’t commit and sentenced to life in prison. She had been pregnant at the time, and the prison matrons stole her baby and sold it on the black market, telling her it had died. When she finds out the truth, she escapes prison and devotes her life to finding her child. She changes her name to Abby Tyler, and over the years, becomes a successful resort owner. Her resort is The Grove, located in the desert not far from Palm Springs, so remote that guests come and go by airplane rather than car. The Grove is a discreet, anything goes type of place frequented by celebrities and anyone else with the cash to live out a few of their fantasies.
Ophelia, Coco, and Sissy are three very different women who all receive notice that they won a contest entitling them to a week’s stay at the Grove. Coco, a police psychic, goes to the resort in search of her soul mate, eagerly hooking up with any man who seems like he might fit the bill, yet finding herself attracted to a man named Kenny who does a memory act at the resort. Kenny doesn’t seem to fit any of the criteria Coco’s crystal had promised her soul mate would have, but she can’t seem to stop thinking about him. Sissy receives a nasty surprise when she gets to the resort, causing her to examine her entire life and marriage. Ophelia comes to do some thinking. She’s got an intense personal dilemma on her hands, and hopes to be able to work it out at the resort. None of the women can remember entering a contest, but they all come to the resort for their own reasons. Abby Tyler has one reason for having invited the three women: one of them is her long-lost daughter.
While the guests at the resort live out their fantasies and work out their personal issues, a dark force is at work in Las Vegas. Mike Fallon is now an important businessman, but he’s had to silence a few people who know about his sordid past along the way. Now, Abby Tyler is looking into his baby smuggling activities, and he needs to silence her before his precious daughter’s wedding to a socially prominent man. While Abby Tyler and her guests go about their business, Fallon concocts a plan that could destroy everything.
Kathryn Harvey seems to have the formula down for a good thriller starring a woman with a past. Her two previous novels, Butterfly and Stars, did it a little better than this one, but this is still a good book on its own merits. Whereas Harvey’s earlier efforts delved deeply into the heroine’s back story, following her from her humble beginnings to the successful woman she becomes, this book merely made a few references to the past and dealt mostly with the present, concentrating more on sex and fantasies than the actual story. That’s great news for readers who go for that kind of thing, but it’s a bit disappointing for someone who loved the depth in Harvey’s earlier books. This is definitely an erotic thriller, but at least it refrains from using crude terms or being outright unrealistic in its descriptions. While her earlier work was better, Kathryn Harvey can still pen a gripping book.