Harper Torch (Paperback), ISBN 0-06-008928-8
Talia Marchand works in Washington, D.C., as a political consultant -- a long way from her poverty-stricken upbringing in Louisiana. She enjoys her moving-and-shaking, high-powered career, until childhood friend and former lover Derrick Guillory visits her.

Derrick warns Talia of her mother Monette's latest scheme to get out of prison, where she languished for many years on charges of dealing drugs. Talia blows the news off, but after her foster mother, Mama Rose, falls ill, Talia returns home to care for her.

With Derrick so near after many years apart, passion again flares between the couple. But Talia doesn't want to be tied to the kind of rollercoaster lifestyle she associates with Derrick's career as a private investigator. The conflict escalates when Derrick does some work on Monette's case. Talia wants nothing to do with her mother and feels that her sentence was justified.

Slowly, with much pressure from Mama Rose, Derrick and Talia's brother Karl, Talia comes to terms with her past and her relationship with her mother. She eventually testifies in favor of her mother at the parole hearing. But the district attorney who put Monette away now serves as the state's attorney general, and his ambition, which stretches much further, demands Monette to remain in prison. Derrick digs around in the attorney general's past, putting everyone involved in the case in jeopardy, which further heightens the tension between Derrick and Talia.

The combination of romance and mystery (just why does the attorney general want Monette to stay in prison?) intrigues, but the dual plot lines get a bit unwieldy. The sexual tension between Talia and Derrick borders on the unbelievable, and the segues into the sex scenes comes across as very awkward and abrupt. The tension drags on and on throughout the book, then Lynn Emery wraps everything up neatly in a mere eight pages. The resolution comes too quickly, as if Emery labored under a page limit and ran out of space.

Jen Foote

Jen Foote recently moved to central Florida, where she is a copy editor and page designer at a small daily newspaper. She is ecstatic to live an hour away from the ocean.

Click here to share your views.