Summertime - Softcover

Elizabeth Rigbey

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140273301 ISBN 13: 9780140273304

Publisher: Penguin Books, Limited (UK), 2004

Synopsis

Lucy Shaffer is the toast of Wall Street. There's no deal she cannot fix, no problem she cannot solve. Her life is completely under control. Her office, her apartment, her wardrobe, her daily schedule; all run like clockwork. Everything is in its proper place. Everything, that is, except the past...As summertime approaches, lingering clouds of guilt and self-doubt gather on her horizon. Does anyone know the real Lucy? Does she know herself? And if her Northern California childhood and adolescence were so perfect, why has she sought sanctuary in New York? Why has the person she loves most encouraged her never to return?

About this title

About the Author

Liz Rigbey lives in Hampshire. Summertime is her second novel. Her first, Total Eclipse, was published four years ago to huge acclaim.

From Publishers Weekly

Eight years after her well-received debut, Total Eclipse, Rigbey returns with another psychological suspense novel, ambitiously conceived but frustratingly disjointed. Overpopulated and overly complicated, the murky plot advances in fits and starts. The pacing is disrupted by frequent flashbacks to the lives of the various members of two generations of the family of a former Russian KGB agent who defected with his wife and three daughters to California-and families of their friends and neighbors as well. Narrated as the first-person account of the granddaughter of the Russian defector, ambitious young investment banker Lucy Schaffer, the story opens three years after Lucy has abandoned her husband and family and fled to New York to forget the tragic death of her infant son. Called home to California when her father's corpse is pulled from the Pacific, Lucy is told that he may have been murdered. She is delegated the responsibility of tying up the loose ends of the estate, and she also takes on the task of investigating the mystifying circumstances surrounding her father's strange peregrinations on the day of his death. Meanwhile, she is forced to confront repressed memories of growing up as the younger daughter of a schizophrenic mother and a father raised by religious zealots. Rigbey's prose is smooth, but even those patient enough to endure the novel's blind alleys and red herrings will be frustrated by the contrived twists at the end.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Books, Limited (UK)
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0140273301
• ISBN 13: 9780140273304
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 448