The Grey Beginning

Rating:
Summary: Must've been having a bad time
Review: Elizabeth Peters/Barbara Michaels is one of the few non-fantasy authors that I devote any time to, and when she is good she is AMAZING. Such books as "The Crying Child," "Shattered Silk," and "Houses of Stone" have kept me reading wide-eyed long into the night. This book didn't really have that quality (and normally I love books set in Italy) like the dismal "Here I Stay," which I was unable to FINISH.

Heroine Kathy Malone, recovering from a stay in a loony bin following the death of her husband Bart, is travelling to Italy to tell his formidable grandmother of his death. Through a rather bizarre event, the grandmother comes to believe that Kathy is pregnant with Bart's child, and insists on keeping her there in royal treatment. Kathy gets a boyfriend or two, and befriends a ten-year-old relation named Pietro who is reportedly insane - and then discovers a sinister web of deception and death, that ensnares her and Pietro both.

I wish there were more plot to describe without giving away the ending, but sadly there isn't. This book would have made a better short story. There is too much time spent on Kathy rambling around the Italian village and lying to the Contessa and worrying about not being pregnant and insisting that Pietro is sane. There was nothing particularly endearing or enlightening about Kathy, or indeed about any of the characters. The Contessa is the most engaging person in the book, yet even she is not particularly interesting to the reader.

Michaels is also a master of witty prose/dialogue and romantic suspense, but neither is in this book. The best humor is some heavy-handed stuff about Kathy's childhood nickname, and the romance consists of Kathy conversing (I can't say flirting) with some local guys, all of whom have as little personality as she.

Quite a few sections should have been edited (if Bart was such a fink, why did Kathy continue to have erotic dreams about him?) or explained in more detail (the housekeeper's actions at the end). Even the writing style is rather dry and unexplanatory. The pace is uneven -- the book dribbles along for the first three quarters, then rushes the rest of the way.

I can only assume that Ms. Michaels was having a bad time during the writing of this book, and then go back to "Houses."

Rating:
Summary: Suspenseful Barbara Michaels
Review: This book focuses on the life of Kathy Morandini, after her death of her husband, Bart. It goes through the challenges and surprises she encounters while trying to cope with her husband's death. In the mean time, she tries to find closure with her husband's old-fashioned Italian family. Primarily, with the Contessa Morandini, Bart's grandmother, who never met the girl with whom Bart spent his last days. Their first meeting ended up with the idea that Kathy was pregnant with Bart's child, a lie which kept her alive. Instead, what Kathy does get out of it is a child branded with madness, a couple of possible new love interests, and the spook of a lifetime. The Italian countryside, where the Morandini villa was located, proved to be a haunting place full of lies, death, treachery, and disgrace, and Kathy was caught in the middle of it all.
Barbara Michaels used an interesting and subtle way to add romance with suspense into her novel. She created a setting for a Nancy Drew mixed with Stephen King suspense elements in The Grey Beginning. I liked the easy-to-read writing that was used for a better understanding of the context and the many surprises that were added which made me not want to put the book down. This book was written to throw the reader off into a game of guessing where everyone was an actor in this mystery.
The clues that were dropped, threw my guesses off track and made me more caught up in the novel. I started to read this book thinking it would just be a story about the memories recollected by a young widow haunted by her husband's death. But because of Barbara Michaels captivating writing skills, this book was far from what I expected it to be. Instead, it was an intriguing look into the dangers of love and hate, faith and betrayal.
I recommend this novel to those who like page-turners full of romance embedded with a mix of thrill and mystery. It was an attention-grabber and I hope everyone will enjoy The Grey Beginning as I did.

Rating:
Summary: For lovers of the gothic genre
Review: Very modern gothic. The atmosphere was perfect: the isolated villa near Firenze, the hostile servants, the tragic little kid. But this is Barbara Michaels, so all this oppressiveness was tempered with touches of humour, like Pietro's preocupation with American football and the character of David. It worked perfectly.

I loved that it took me a long time to be sure of what exactly was happening, though I had some ideas almost from the first. The important thing was that Kathy was perfectly justified in not realizing what was going on; too often the heroine in a gothic comes across as stupid for not noticing things. Not her.

The what exactly was going on was a bit jarring and not completely believable, so this wasn't perfect. Other than that, an excellent example of the genre.