The Real Katie Lavender by Erica James

If Erica James has carved out a niche for herself in the cluttered world of light romance fiction, it is one in which vile weather never descends, there is no such thing as a traffic jam, and the laundry is done by little elves who come in the night. Reading one of her books is like escaping into such a world – the intellectual equivalent of sinking into a warm bath clutching a glass of wine after a very long day.

In this sense, there is little to distinguish her latest, The Real Katie Lavender, from 2010’s The Queen of New Beginnings or the 13 novels that preceded them. Where James flexes her imagination most is in the set-up: Katie Lavender is a 30-year-old woman who in the opening pages is sacked unceremoniously from her job in media production. She takes this on the chin, largely because she knows real loss. Three years ago, her father died abruptly from septicaemia caused by food poisoning (who knew to be afraid of that?), and it is one year since the death of her mother.

Katie, an only child, was close to her parents and is bereft – but this being the type of story it is, James steers delicately away from an analysis of grief and towards Katie’s irreverent best friends Tess and Zac and, most usefully, towards a letter from a lawyer’s office summoning her for a meeting.

Perplexed, she arrives to be informed of the truth about her parentage. She is not her father’s biological daughter but the product of a brief affair during her parents’ marriage. Her father forgave her mother and raised Katie as his own. Her natural father is apparently a man both of conscience and some standing, for he has endowed her, she now learns, with a trust fund worth more than £750,000.

Her curiosity piqued, she goes in search of Stirling Nightingale, and in the most ludicrous of a series of implausible positionings – this is where the wine comes in handy – stages her first meeting with him by posing as a waitress at the 90th birthday celebration for his mother, Cecily. There she also encounters his two grown children with Gina, his wife of 34 years, and meets her obnoxious, egotistical half-brother (Rosco, 32), and her pregnant, self-absorbed, 29-year-old half-sister Scarlet.

On the same occasion, Stirling receives a visit from the police with the news that his brother and business partner Neil has been found dead. The suicide was prompted, it transpires, by events including the embezzlement of money from the firm’s clients and an extramarital affair. Neil’s wife Pen, a gifted gardener with a sweet exterior and a core of steel, is blindsided.

The stage is set for romantic trials and family travails . . . but wait, where’s the love interest? That would be Lloyd, Neil and Pen’s son. (If you’ve deduced that this makes him Katie’s first cousin, you’d be right – but you can be sure Ms James has a solution.)

The Real Katie Lavender is the brightest and most undemanding of chick lit. There are idyllic settings – Pen’s glorious gardens, the majestic Nightingale family home, Lloyd’s cosy love nest – and a clutch of themes that are sufficiently stimulating in the moment to hold attention but not so unsavoury as to be unpleasant reading (infidelity and other garden-variety secrets and lies, troublesome relationships with in-laws). There is nothing to offend a sensitive reader or to please those with exacting literary standards – but the rest of us are comfortably served.

2 / 5 stars: Safe, supremely unchallenging chick-lit.

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Promises, Promises by Erica James

Ah, ‘tis an enterprise as unpredictable as the performance of an Antipodean cricket team, the creation of light fiction aimed at a female audience (chick-lit, if you prefer); for every considered, clever Jennifer Weiner output, there is a clunker from an off-her-game Maeve Binchy.

Sitting somewhere in the middle, in this instance, is a New Year release from Erica James, Promises, Promises. In keeping with a prolific publishing rate that has seen the British writer produce 15 novels since 1996, it appears a little less than 12 months after the well-received The Queen of New Beginnings.

The timing is optimal – James is nothing if not the ideal summer-holiday companion – and here she sticks to the formula that has served her well since her debut, A Breath of Fresh Air: introduce two or three main characters, each with A Big Problem Somehow Related to Love or its Absence, and watch as this problem is addressed in a sequence of daffy, often humiliating conversations, accidental encounters and outright pratfalls. By the end . . . well, that’s for you to guess.

You should not expect Ms James to have you on tenterhooks – her books are designed not for suspense but for comfort, of the sinking-into-a-mid-winter-bubble-bath-at-the-end-of-a-hard-day variety. Her knack for creating Manichaean, hero/villain dichotomies among her characters turns what would otherwise be a weakness – two-dimensionality – into a virtue, enabling her to set up climactic, life-changing events that allow every member of the cast, whether lead or supporting, to receive his just deserts.

The title refers to the promises made to themselves by the main characters: by the put-upon house-cleaner and wife, Maggie Storm, to stick up for herself when her sloth-like husband demands another beer or his comically vile mother hoves into view; by the decorator Ella Moore, who swears off unwise emotional attachments after a seven-year relationship founders in the face of unconquerable hostility from her widowed boyfriend’s teenage daughter; and by Ethan Edwards, a serial philanderer who is really a nice chap underneath it all and is ripe for rescue and redemption at the hands of the right woman (there is a subtle strain of feminism running through James’ work).

Maggie, Ella and Ethan all bear sufficient resemblance to real people to be plausible, and James adds heat, flavour and amusing absurdity with Brenda, the aforementioned mother-in-law and mistress of Evil Sid, the carnivorous canine who plays an unwitting role in the liberation of Maggie; Francine and Valentina, Ethan’s grasping wife and daughter; and Ella’s former de facto stepchildren, Toby and Alexis.

The gist of Promises, Promises is easily gleaned from the cover blurb; the value in reading it lies in its reliable provision of light diversion, much as a tea-and-chocolate break gives respite during an afternoon’s work. Fifteen novels in, Erica James remains on form.

2.5 / 5 stars: Brain candy.  Click here to view more Easy Mix Book Reviews.

Worst Case by James Patterson

I knew James Patterson was one of the more prolific crime writers working today, but I did a double-take when I read a few months ago that he had signed a 17-book deal with his publisher to take him through to 2012 – that’s around six books a year.

I didn’t have the foggiest idea how he was going to pull that off until I saw that the cover of Worst Case attributes the book to Patterson . . . and one Michael Ledwidge. On closer inspection of Patterson’s many other titles, most of them, apart from the famous Alex Cross series, have been written in concert with others (a bit like Michelangelo and his students, a fan might say – Patterson is clearly a skilled delegator as well as a master crime writer)

Worst Case revives one of Patterson’s regular protagonists, Detective Michael Bennett of the NYPD, who is called to investigate the kidnapping of the teenage son of a billionaire industrialist. Several similar abductions rapidly ensue.

Although the police are stymied as to why wealthy young people are being targeted, we readers are in the advantageous position of being able to meet the kidnapper early in the book and learn that his lofty goal is to ascertain the degree of his captive’s social consciousness by quizzing them about social justice, environmental issues and related topics. All of this is connected to how the vast sea of money that supports their cosseted lifestyles is earned, and needless to say, our villain has rather strong views – so strong, in fact, that if the helpless kidnap victims don’t come up with the right answer, they die.

A few unfortunate teenagers do meet a premature end due to their lack of required knowledge. At the same time, the parents use their influence to turn up the heat on the authorities and the media (and a entertainingly annoying, obtuse deputy mayor, who makes a couple of memorable appearances), which brings fetching FBI agent Emily Parker into the story.

Worst Case is a good potboiler – there is nothing stunningly original about the plot, but the novel has some deft, appealing touches, my favourites being the scenes of Michael Bennett’s frantic home life. He has 10 (that is not a typo) children, all adopted with his wife, who passed away two years ago. Michael stoically combines full-time killer-hunting with raising them, with the help of his father, a priest, and a long-suffering nanny, Mary Catherine, who carries a torch for him. Can’t blame her – he is not the most fleshed-out of crime heroes, but his manner is unusually endearing.

For me, the family scenes (particularly an early passage in which he invites Emily home for dinner without warning her first what she will be walking into) add a layer of humanity and warmth to the book, which helps both to draw you to Michael and to offset the unpleasantness of what is happening to children elsewhere. I’d be interested to know if Patterson or Ledwidge is chiefly responsible for this.

The speed of production has meant this book is highly topical – the relationship of corporate malfeasance to the recession, and big-city terrorism, both warrant some of the authors’ attention.

3/5 Stars – Patterson books are a bit like buses, in that if you miss one, there’ll be another along shortly – and I see on his website that Worst Case is one of five listed for release in 2010 – but you can always be assured of an entertaining and diverting ride.  Click here to listen to the Easy Mix Audio Review.

The Queen of New Beginnings by Erica James

For fans of light-hearted literature, Erica James will need no introduction; she’s written 13 bestselling novels with titles like A Breath of Fresh Air, Love and Devotion and It’s the Little Things, so you know you’re venturing into serious chick-lit territory when you embark on one of her books.

The Queen of New Beginnings has at its heart two primary characters. The first one we meet is Clayton Miller, an ostracized and deeply self-pitying comedy writer. He had a stellar career which came to a screeching halt around the time his long-term girlfriend left him for his best friend and writing partner. Unable to cope, Clayton has suffered a very public fall from grace and when we meet him at the novel’s opening, he has been banished by his agent to a remote house in the English countryside.

Enter Alice Shoemaker, a one-time actress and now voiceover artist who does some cleaning jobs on the side. Her first encounter with Clayton is a classic romantic-comedy ‘meet cute’, when she shows up to do some cleaning work at what happens to be her old childhood home and, for fun and because Clayton immediately strikes her as a pompous git, adopts the persona and accent of a Polish housekeeper called Katya.

They steadily overcome their initial hostility towards each other, and this is where the story really takes off. Through a series of conversations with Clayton, Alice recounts her experiences in the house and the highly dramatic events that occurred within her family (this makes for some unusually juicy reading, even by chick-lit standards); we find out how and why she became completely estranged from her father, and why she changed her surname so that none of her relatives could ever track her down.

Things develop romantically between the pair and it’s all going swimmingly until Clayton realizes that his writer’s block has been unstopped by Alice’s family story, and he finds himself writing a screenplay heavily based on her life. It’s all extremely personal, of course, and he knows that she would be furious and devastated if she found out – but when a production company wants to film it, and thus rescue his moribund career, Clayton finds himself having to choose between Alice and his work.

Ultimately, there’s not much in the way of suspense. Rather, it’s classic romantic-comedy writing in which it is clear the two protagonists will eventually find their way to each other but have to overcome things like pride and miscommunication and the more idiotic aspects of their own nature in order to do so. The journey is no less enjoyable for its predictability.

3/5 Stars - If you don’t know Erica James, it might help if I tell you that I found this novel to be very Marian Keyes-ish – it’s funny, with a good plot, and a reliable choice for the beach or the plane or just when you need some escapism.  Click here to listen to the Easy Mix Audio Review.