REVIEW: Shadow Lover by Anne Stuart

Shadow Lover (1999) by Anne Stu­art is a roman­tic sus­pense novel pub­lished by Onyx. It’s a standalone.

Anne Stu­art is prob­a­bly best known for her dark heroes. Heroes who enjoy skirt­ing very close to or step­ping over the line. I’d say the hero in “Shadow Lover” is one of the rare ones who doesn’t cross it completely.

The story opens with the sur­prise return of the prodi­gal son. After an 18 year absence, Alex Mac­Dow­ell returns to the promi­nent, wealthy Mac­Dow­ell fam­ily fold.

Sally Mac­Dow­ell, the matri­arch of the fam­ily is dying. As her sole heir, Alex stands to get half of the Mac­Dow­ell for­tune. How­ever, his return isn’t well received from the other mem­bers of the fam­ily, espe­cially from Car­olyn Smith, his “almost” half-sister.

The Mac­Dow­ell fam­ily took Car­olyn in and raised her but never offi­cially adopted her. She left her job and her life behind in Boston to take care of Sally for the past 8 months. Car­olyn refuses to leave her bed­side despite the fact that Sally has a nurse to take care of her.

Car­olyn uses Sally as an excuse to stay near the Mac­Dow­ell fam­ily. Hon­estly, I couldn’t tell you why she even both­ers. Each of the Mac­Dow­ells with the excep­tion of Alex and Sally, treat her like an out­sider. But it is later explained to us that Car­olyn also stands to gain finan­cially from Sally’s death.

Car­olyn doesn’t believe that this stranger is the real “Alex Mac­Dow­ell.” Her rea­sons for believ­ing that Alex is an impos­tor is sup­ported by an event that hap­pened on Martha’s Vine­yard 18 years ago. She has good rea­son to believe that the “real” Alex Mac­Dow­ell is dead.

The story then spits out a lot of expo­si­tion into Alex’s past and also plays heav­ily on Carolyn’s sus­pi­cions. I mean is this the real Alex or not? We also learn that the MacDowell’s are a dys­func­tional fam­ily. After all the smoke and mir­rors, it all boils down to greed. I got tired of being reminded of Sally’s dying. Oy, it was uttered so much that you never for­got it and couldn’t wait till the event finally got here.

Read­ing this story, I sus­pected the truth behind Alex’s dis­ap­pear­ance and sure enough it unfolded just like I thought it would. Carolyn’s dis­dain for Alex was so con­vinc­ing that I had a hard time believ­ing that she’d fallen in love with him. Only Car­olyn knows the truth behind Alex’s dis­ap­pear­ance. When he left, he took off with the fam­ily cash, jew­els and also with Carolyn’s charm bracelet.

Alex was a hel­lion. A real bad boy that Car­olyn har­bored a crush on when she was young. The romance part of the story started off nice with their back and forth, often heated ban­ter. Alex spent most of the book try­ing to con­vince her that he is the “real Alex.” His plans to seduce her is a for­gone con­clu­sion. It’s the after­math of their love­mak­ing that makes things go off kil­ter and had me scratch­ing my eyes out.

The author does an excel­lent job with the pac­ing and the sus­pense but when the truth unfolds, the story started to loose it’s steam for me. One can’t help but notice all the rep­e­ti­tion and sub­terfuge. The romance was shaky since both admit to being more in lust than in love. But they utter “I love you” anyway.

To enjoy “Shadow Lover” is to not delve too deeply into the con­vo­luted plot. Oth­er­wise, I can see a lot of read­ers enjoy­ing this story. Wish I could add my voice to the oth­ers who praised this novel but I just can’t because Car­olyn was a stuffed shirt wound too tight and Alex was a bad boy hero who often con­tra­dicted him­self and cared more about how to get Car­olyn into bed.

The chem­istry was fine between them but in this case the plot was just too flawed to have me over­look my annoy­ances so this will have to be a C+ from me. I’ve enjoyed one or two other titles by Anne Stu­art, namely, Night­fall and Against the Wind (the lat­ter is a cat­e­gory title of a defunct line).

This review is apart of the TBR Chal­lenge 2009 where read­ers such as myself are read­ing books from our tbr piles and review­ing them on a monthly basis. Make sure to visit the other par­tic­i­pants in this challenge!