I can go hot or cold with Fern Michaels' books but I liked this one. The whole premise just excited me.
Lucy Brighton, the illustrator of a line of children's greeting cards, calendars, comic strip,and children's tv cartoon based on animal characters of Bizzy (a fat male white Persian cat), Izzy (a fat little male Yorkshire terrier), and Lizzy (who is a male parrot with red and green feathers) with the plan of adding Dizzy, a female duck has just finished her work for the year (it is Fall) and packages up her completed work to ship out (including a children's book proposal for the characters) and begins to think about a vacation and some rest. Little does she know that she will immediately be thrust into spy thriller personal drama
This 30 something woman is filthy rich due to the success of her work and company IBL (initials for her original three characters) but has personal unhappiness. Her childhood was missing a lot of things. She has only a couple of very early happy memories of her parents but mostly was raised by housekeepers until she was 10 and sent off to boarding school while her heart surgeon father and psychiatrist mother began traveling the world doing treatments- or so she was told. She had no friends as a kid, didn't learn to skate, sled, swim, ride a bike or other ordinary things, and now lives in her parents New Jersey mansion since they have moved to Florida 5 years earlier. The house seems cold and impersonal to her and a few months earlier, she made an offer to buy a 55 acre property with a big house and a 4 bedroom bunkhouse she can use as a studio. She also has hired her best friend from college, Angie, as a graphic artist so all seems to be well.
Things stop being well when she receives a phone call from a police officer in Florida who announces that her parents have been killed in an auto accident caused by a 16 year old boy who was drunk and who also died in the head on collision. The nightmare begins. Lucy flies first class to Florida and this is where things really begin to seem unrealistic in the way Fern Michaels wrote the book. She had no trouble booking the flight. It went perfectly. She got to Florida and the way she handled the estate- just emailed and faxed stuff to a lawyer she found online was peculiar. No law firm is going to let a stranger just fax them papers, a credit card and driver's license copy, and take on the case without even meeting with or speaking with the potential client. She never spoke with them once nor signed any contracts.
The real jolt came when she realized no one actually was living in the house. There were 7 sets of everything for a man to wear and 7 sets for a woman, no food, no cosmetics or hairbrushes used, the house was identical to the one in New Jersey and she found a hidden safe by accident that was full of money (close to a million in cash), guns, bullets, and phony driver's licenses and passports from different countries for her parents. She also discovered that when she was 10, two ten million dollar life insurance policies were taken out with her as beneficiary. She has an encounter with an attractive builder who runs the company that built the Florida house Luke Kingston after she has packed up all of the stuff (including the contents of the secret safe and the urns containing her parents) and loaded it in Dad's Range Rover. Unfortunately, the meeting is after she was struck by lightning just as she was about to drive off and she wound up hospitalized for days but sent back to her parents' home to be cared for by the neighbors Adel and Buddy Longhurst (Adel was a nurse), a pair of empty nesters who never see or hear from their own grown kids.
Fern Michaels always seems to feature young women who have all the money in the world, earned in ways they likely would not have gained the money they have. She also has weird things that make no sense in the books and here we run into more of that. Luke decides he is in love with Lucy based on her green eyes. Who knows what would happen to him if he ever visited Ireland? Or even met me- I have green eyes myself. All he does from then on is discuss her green eyes with everyone. Also, while it was Lucy's FOOT that was almost seared off, suddenly she didn't know who she was or anything about herself and decided along with Adel and Buddy to call them Mom and Dad. Plus as the cherry on top of the nuttiness, she suddenly gets her memory back and then can read minds. Oh please, Fern, make it stop.
Angie comes and drives her back to New Jersey where they find that the mystery- and Luke (after the FBI shows up) follow them and where they find out that the New Jersey house has a secret safe with the same kind of stuff in it- and someone wants it back! Who were these people? Lucy becomes convinced that they were not her parents and frankly the idea that a kid would live with her parents for 10 years then suddenly have a whole different set of parents show up and she wouldn't notice it wasn't the same people is ridiculous.
This is an easy read and it was fun. There is more unbelievable stuff to come so be prepared to suspend reality in a big way. She has some saccharin sweet material about Luke and Lucy (I just met you but plan to stick my tongue in your mouth and suck out your tonsils? What woman says that?) and some unrealistic stuff about animals- she gets a dog, cat, parrot and duck and sleeps with them, lets them chew up everything and pee on the carpet and is GLAD about it? She writes the duck into her characters with it losing its feathers and the parrot giving it some of his then starting a parrot-duck love affair? Oh please.