Books I've read: Under the Stars

I read this one over the weekend, and while it wasn't a bad read, I feel a little bit like the author couldn't

decide exactly what they wanted to write and threw everything they could in there.  It's part romance, part family saga, part mystery and part historical fiction.  With a little bit of thriller thrown in there for good measure.  It kind of works, but it does kind of give you whiplash as a reader.

Audrey has recently been abandoned by her husband and left with a pile of debts after he didn't;t tell her the restaurant they owned together was tanking.  Still trying to dig herself out of the financial and emotional hole this has left her in, she agrees to help her mother, Meredith,, a famous Hollywood actress, dry out before she reports for her next role.

They head to the remote New England island where Meredith grew up for some privacy and isolation.  Neither she nor Audrey are thrilled to be there, but in terms of privacy, they can't fault it.  Plus, Audrey's father still lives there, running the local bar like his parents did.  Having grown up off-island, Audrey's relationship with him is tentative, at best, but she's curious enough to make some effort.

When she finds a trunk full of old paintings in the basement of the bar, it excites curiosity, even among wealthy neighbor Sedge Peabody, one of the wealthiest residents of the island.  The mystery of how a trunkful of unknown paintings from one of America's leading artists came to be hidden in the cellar of the local inn is one demanding to be solved.  As is the question of who the woman is in all these paintings.

Told in parallel with Audrey's story is the story of the woman in those paintings, a woman who fled Boston with the law on her heels in 1846 and was one of the survivors of a catastrophic shipwreck.  Who this woman was and why she was on this ship the night it sank with the detective in charge of investigating the mysterious death of her employer makes up another strand of the story.

The third strand is Meredith's story, about growing up on Winthrop Island with one goal: to get away and never come back.  A goal that becomes more and more difficult to imagine as life throws obstacles in her wake at every turn.

I didn't hate this book.  There was so much going on, it was easy to keep turning pages to find out what might happen next.  But that's really the problem with it:  there was so much going on.  Murder and deception and blackmail and theft and kidnapping and... well, it goes on.  And somewhere in there, were three romance stories too.  It was just a bit much!  There was enough plot in this one book for about three books.

So, if you're looking for something that will keep you turning pages and might make your head spin from how quickly the mood changes from one thing to the next, this one might be fore you.

But don't just listen to me. Here's the blurb:

Audrey Fisher has struggled all her life to emerge from the shadow of her famous mother by forging a career as a world-class chef. Meredith Fisher’s glamorous screen persona disguises the trauma of the tragic accident that haunts her dreams. Neither woman wants to return to the New England island they left behind and its complicated emotional ties, but Meredith has one last chance to sober up and salvage her big comeback, and where else but discreet, moneyed Winthrop Island can a famous actress spend the summer without the intrusion of other people? Until Audrey discovers an old wooden chest among the belongings of her estranged bartender father, Mike Kennedy, and the astonishing contents draw the women deep into Winthrop’s past and its many secrets…attracting the interest of their handsome neighbor, Sedge Peabody. How did a trove of paintings from one of America’s greatest artists wind up in the cellar of the Mohegan Inn? And who is the mysterious woman portrayed on every canvas?

On a stormy November night in 1846, Providence Dare flees Boston and boards the luxury steamship Atlantic one step ahead of the law….or so she believes. But when a catastrophic accident leaves the ship at the mercy of a mighty gale, Providence finds herself trapped in a deadly game of cat and mouse with the one man who knows her real identity—the detective investigating the suspicious death of her employer, the painter Henry Irving. As the Atlantic fights for her life and the rocky shore of Winthrop Island edges closer, a desperate Providence searches for her chance to escape…before the sea swallows her without a trace.

In Under the Stars, the destinies of three women converge across centuries, as a harrowing true disaster at the dawn of the steamship era evokes a complex legacy of family secrets in modern-day New England. Williams has written a timeless epic of mothers and daughters, of love lost and found, and of the truths that echo down generations.