Wednesday’s Child, Gayle Wilson [Guest Review]

Wednesday’s Child (HQN 2005) by Gayle Wil­son (384 pgs) is a roman­tic sus­pense novel. This TBR Chal­lenge review was sub­mit­ted by fel­low reader Janet Webb aka @Janet­Nor­Cal.

This month’s TBR cat­e­gory is cat­e­gories and as it hap­pened, I spent most of the week­end orga­niz­ing my book shelves. My keeper and TBR books are shelved together: I put lit­tle green or orange dots on my TBR books. Fast for­ward to the W books — I spot­ted Wednesday’s Child by Gayle Wil­son and decided to read it for the chal­lenge. I really like Gayle Wilson’s his­tor­i­cals but I have never read one of her contemporaries.

Here’s the back cover description:

“It wasn’t over yet. Susan Chandler’s hus­band van­ished with­out a trace…along with their one-year-old daugh­ter. Now, seven years later, their car has been pulled from a river in some back­wa­ter Mis­sis­sippi town, along with the body of her hus­band and an empty baby seat. The local sher­iff is call­ing it an acci­dent, but for Susan, things just don’t add up. Major Jeb Bed­ford has one thing on his mind—to get his body back into work­ing order and rejoin his Delta Force team ASAP. But Susan Chandler’s quiet des­per­a­tion echoes his own strug­gles. And some­how, pro­tect­ing Susan and help­ing her dis­cover the truth becomes more impor­tant than anything…”

Seven years after her hus­band and daugh­ter dis­ap­peared (and her hus­band emp­tied their bank account), Susan gets a phone call say­ing a car has been found. She imme­di­ately goes to the small south­ern town and starts ask­ing ques­tions … and more ques­tions … and more ques­tions. The push-back from the towns­folk felt pretty pre­dictable: stranger starts pok­ing around and they all close ranks.

The town is so small that there’s no motel but the sher­iff sug­gests she ask Lorena Bed­ford if she can stay in her ante­bel­lum man­sion. The south­ern set­ting was great, and so was Mrs. Bed­ford. Lorena is in her late eight­ies but she’s no slouch: she’s feisty, well-informed, and an excel­lent south­ern cook. The hero, Jeb Bed­ford, is Lorena’s great-nephew and he’s stay­ing with his great-aunt while he rehabs.

There weren’t a lot of sur­prises in this book. The h/h don’t really hit it off at the begin­ning but that grad­u­ally changes. Susan is very flat, in my opin­ion. Unlike “Cry No More”, the book by Linda Howard that I com­pared this to as I read it, I didn’t have much sense of how the last seven years had passed for Susan. And maybe her quiet, not really involv­ing per­son­al­ity, was a reflec­tion of her unhap­pi­ness and deep sor­row over the loss of her daughter.

Jeb was again, rather a stock char­ac­ter, a spe­cial ops sol­dier des­per­ate to return to the fray, but I was inter­ested in his men­tal and phys­i­cal strug­gles to get back in shape. A side note: his doc­tor had on his wall the quo­ta­tion that Nel­son Man­dela quoted in the movie Invic­tus. As I said, Susan asks ques­tions and gets pre­cious lit­tle infor­ma­tion back and then acci­dents start to hap­pen: a car try­ing to run her off the road and such. It’s clear that there’s a con­spir­acy of silence which Susan and Jeb try to break through.

At a moment of despair, they come together in “an attempt to for­get”. Even writ­ing that makes me think “cliché alert” but at least their sex­ual inter­lude is twenty or so pages instead of one (I’m not mea­sur­ing pages as much as inti­macy: they do talk, they are changed by their love-making) but I still felt removed from it and not convinced.

I “knew” who the daugh­ter was very early on – which I thought rang a bit false. When things started to fall together, the plot went into over­drive: sur­pris­ing vil­lains, every­one was crash­ing around in the swampy woods, deaths and so on and so forth. The mother and child reunion struck me as par­tic­u­larly false and unbe­liev­able. After a seven year gap, the ease with which the lit­tle girl shifted loy­al­ties was just too pat. In the epi­logue, every­thing is pre­sented as pretty much peachy keen and even the lit­tle girl’s name is different.

Putting my cards on the table, I really don’t like books about miss­ing chil­dren. Even with a promised happy end­ing, it’s just too painful read­ing. Why then is Linda Howard’s Cry No More one of my most re-read and favored books of all time? I think it’s because the end­ing is so painfully true: elapsed time can­not be papered over, even if your child was taken away from you in a crim­i­nal fash­ion. In books with this plot, bit­ter­sweet seems more believ­able than every­thing work­ing as seam­lessly as it did in “Wednesday’s Child”. I just was not able to sus­pend my dis­be­lief enough to buy into the story.

****

Thanks Janet!

For Fur­ther Reading

• Man­hunt­ing, Jen­nifer Crusie
• A Can­dle for Nick, Lorna Michaels [Guest Review]
• Gen­tle Reminder: Next Thurs­day Is Start of TBR Challenge
• “Hard to Hold,” Stephanie Tyler
• Revis­it­ing Vic­to­ria Holt, Queen of Gothic Romance
• REVIEW: Shadow Lover by Anne Stuart
• REVIEW: No Sur­ren­der (Devlin Group Series No.3) by Shan­non Stacey
• Reader’s Cor­ner: There’s a Fine Line Between Roman­tic Sus­pense and Mystery
• DNF REVIEW: A Soldier’s Home­com­ing by Rachel Lee
• REVIEW: Risky Games by Olga Bicos

Tagged as: Gayle Wilson, HQN romance, Romantic suspense, TBR2010