Heaven Falls: A Novel

Winslow Eliot
Telemachus Press (2010)
ISBN 9780984108381
Reviewed by Olivera Baumgartner-Jackson for Reader Views (12/10) 

 

I’ve never been much of a romance reader. As a rule, I find them bland and all too predictable. Worse yet, most heroines are so Goody Two-Shoes that I simply can’t stand them. Having said that, now and then I still give romances a try, and sometimes I am glad I did. “Heaven Falls” definitely belongs into that category.

Tess Duncan’s life has never been particularly easy. Orphaned as an infant, she was brought up by her loving aunt Cory. All too young she fell for the wrong man, and ended up raising her wonderful daughter Freya as a single parent. Her daily life was already a hard enough struggle, but when Cory died, it seemed she had no more solutions left to her - then came the unexpected offer to move to Heaven Falls, an ultra exclusive, all-inclusive spa resort like no other. But as most anything else in life, that offer was not without strings. It came from the Garrisons’ - the family of Freya’s father Max, who died a short while ago in an accident. As much as Tess did not want to have anything to do with them, she was forced to reconsider. She had to take care of Freya, and with her finances in shambles, the offer of a home and a job at Heaven Falls seemed to be the best possible solution.

Soon after her arrival Tess realized that there was a lot being unsaid. She could never quite figure out why they were invited there in the first place, and even less why it happened when it did. It also became painfully obvious that there were some rather sinister undercurrents at work all around her, and that the Garrisons were a highly dysfunctional family. To make matters worse, Tess found herself falling hard for Max’s brother Jason. And all of that was just the beginning…

Wonderfully imaginative and filled with a series of rather unexpected twists, “Heaven Falls” was a truly engaging book. While at first I found Tess maddeningly vacillating, I later decided that this trait actually made her more believable, at least in my opinion. Very few of us live in a precisely defined black/white world, and it is the shades of gray that often make us wishy-washy. I’ve enjoyed the author’s style, the plot and the highly complex characters. The romance between Tess and Jason was believable, the twists and turns exciting and suspenseful, and I found the descriptions of different essential oils at the beginning of each chapter to be some of my favorite parts of the book.

“Heaven Falls” is one of those stories that you will not want to start unless you have a long, lazy weekend ahead of you. Once you get past the slightly slow start, it won’t let you get much sleep until you finish it.

Make comment on weblog

FTC Disclosure