Tag: Harry Whittaker

The Last Love Song by Lucinda Riley

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This is a reworking of one of Lucinda Riley’s early novels, originally published as Losing You in 1997 under the name Lucinda Edmonds. After Riley’s death in 2021, her son Harry Whittaker completed her unfinished novel, Atlas, then updated another of her early books, Hidden Beauty, as The Hidden Girl. It would be interesting to know exactly how much is Whittaker’s work, but without reading the originals it’s impossible to tell.

The Last Love Song begins in 1964 in the village of Ballymore on the coast of West Cork, Ireland. When sixteen-year-old Sorcha O’Donovan goes to see a local band with her friends from school, she has no idea that her life is about to change forever. Within months she is heading for London with the lead singer, Con Daly, having been disowned by her father, who disapproves of their relationship. After a period of struggling to make ends meet while Con looks for opportunities in London’s vibrant music scene, he finally achieves stardom with his new band, The Fishermen, and he and Sorcha become rich and famous almost overnight. Of course, this doesn’t necessarily bring happiness and when Helen McCarthy, a face from both their pasts, arrives back in their lives, everything starts to go wrong.

Two decades later, preparations are being made for a huge charity concert at Wembley Stadium. The Fishermen have agreed to reform for the event, but one member is missing – Con Daly, who disappeared seventeen years ago after suffering a personal tragedy. There’s only one person who may be able to find out what happened all those years earlier; the problem is, she’s in prison…

I enjoyed this book; it was much more than just the simple romance it seemed to be at first. Although I found Sorcha slightly bland, I thought Helen McCarthy was a great character and I veered between loving and hating her at various times throughout the book. Mostly I admired her for trying to get what she wanted out of life despite things not always going her way. There’s also a crime element to the story, which becomes stronger towards the end – my biggest criticism of the book is that this part of the plot is dropped for a long section in the middle – and although I easily guessed who the culprit was, I was kept in suspense wondering when and how they would finally be caught!

What I really loved about this book, though, is the portrayal of the 60s music scene. The novel takes us step by step through every stage of the Fishermens’ rise to fame, beginning with the formation of the band and choosing of the name, their first meeting with the man who would become their manager, and the difficulties they faced in getting signed to a record label. The complex and often tense relationships between the four band members are explored and it’s difficult not to think of the Beatles, with Con and Todd in the Lennon-McCartney positions as the band’s two main songwriters, Derek as an aspiring songwriter in his own right, struggling to make himself heard, and Ian as the happy-go-lucky drummer. If you enjoyed Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones and the Six, I think you’ll like the musical aspect of this novel, if nothing else!

I think there are one or two more Edmonds novels that haven’t been published yet, but I haven’t seen any news on whether Harry Whittaker will be reworking them as well. Of the books already available under the Riley name, I haven’t read Hothouse Flower or The Angel Tree yet, so still have those two to look forward to. I’ve also discovered that Harry has written his own book, Orlando, coming later this year.

Thanks to Pan Macmillan for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

The Hidden Girl by Lucinda Riley

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When Lucinda Riley died in 2021, it seemed that there would be no new books from her, but since then her son Harry Whittaker has completed her final, unfinished Seven Sisters novel, Atlas, and now has reworked one of her earliest novels which was originally published as Hidden Beauty in 1993 under the name of Lucinda Edmonds. Retitled The Hidden Girl, it’s not clear exactly how much input Harry has had, but he states in the foreword that he has ‘refreshed and updated the text’.

After a brief prologue, we meet our heroine Leah Thompson as a shy teenage girl living with her parents in 1970s Yorkshire. Leah has no big plans for the future – her time is filled with schoolwork and assisting her mother with her job as housekeeper at the big farmhouse owned by Rose Delancey – and she doesn’t consider herself to be anything special. She does have natural beauty, but is overshadowed by more confident girls, like Mrs Delancey’s adopted daughter, Miranda. Yet it’s Leah, not Miranda, who is spotted by a London modelling agency and within a few years has become one of the world’s top models.

In a second timeline, we join the young Rose – or Rosa as she was previously known – and her brother David, who are children in Poland during the Second World War. Rose and David are from a Jewish family and like many Polish Jews they experience some terrible things and are very lucky to survive the war. Some of the tension is lost because we already know that Rose and David are still alive in the late 1970s – we meet Rose in the very first chapter, a semi-retired artist living in Yorkshire with Miranda and her older son, Miles, and we learn that David is a wealthy businessman and a widower with a teenage son, Brett. However, it’s still harrowing to read about the things they had to go through before reaching a more settled status in life.

Although the wartime narrative does have relevance to the lives of the younger generation – in ways that they themselves don’t understand until much later – most of the novel is devoted to the ‘present day’ storyline (the 70s and 80s). At first I thought it was going to be a bit of a shallow story about celebrities leading glamorous lifestyles, but I soon discovered there was more depth to it than that. Riley explores the dark side of stardom and the fashion industry, including the temptations of drugs and alcohol, the pressure to succeed, the internal rivalries and competitiveness, and the men who just want to take advantage of beautiful young women. Some of the things that happen to Leah’s friend, Jenny, in particular, are horrible and I think anyone who picks up this book expecting a light read may be surprised by the topics it covers.

This is actually the third Lucinda Edmonds book to be reissued under a new title, after The Italian Girl and The Love Letter, but those two were rewritten by Lucinda herself and published during her lifetime. I wonder whether any of her other Edmonds novels will be reworked by Harry now as well – or whether he’ll decide to write a book of his own.

Thanks to Pan Macmillan for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Atlas: The Story of Pa Salt by Lucinda Riley and Harry Whittaker

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In 2014, Lucinda Riley published The Seven Sisters, the first of a seven book series, with each book telling the story of one of the seven daughters of a mysterious billionaire they know only as Pa Salt. Six of the girls were adopted by Pa Salt as babies and although they came from different countries and cultures, they all grew up together at Atlantis, Pa’s beautiful estate by Lake Geneva in Switzerland. They are each named after one of the stars in the Pleiades, or ‘Seven Sisters’, star cluster – Maia, Alycone (Ally), Asterope (Star), Celaeno (CeCe), Taygete (Tiggy) and Electra D’Aplièse. The seventh sister, Merope, was never brought home to Atlantis and we found out why in the seventh book of the series, The Missing Sister.

Shortly after the publication of The Missing Sister in 2021 came the sad news that Lucinda Riley had died following a long battle with cancer…and then the happier news that she had been planning an eighth book about the D’Aplièse family and had left her notes with her son, Harry Whittaker, to be completed after her death. Atlas: The Story of Pa Salt is the result. This book should definitely be read after the other seven, but I think I’ve managed to review it here without spoiling anything, so if you’re new to the series it’s safe to read on!

Most of the earlier books in the series started in the same way, with the D’Aplièse sisters mourning the death of Pa Salt in 2007 and learning that he had left each of them a set of clues to point them in the direction of their biological parents. Each novel would then focus on one sister as she traced her family history and discovered her own heritage. In Atlas: The Story of Pa Salt, it’s now 2008 and all of the sisters and their partners have gathered on board Pa’s yacht, the Titan, to sail out into the Aegean to mark the anniversary of his death. However, Pa’s lawyer, Georg Hoffman, has one more surprise for them – a copy of Pa Salt’s diary, intended to be read by his daughters after his death.

The novel alternates between the modern day storyline set on the Titan and the story that unfolds through the diary of a little boy called Atlas who is found sheltering under a hedge in a Paris garden one day in 1928, starving and exhausted. He is taken in by the kind-hearted Landowski family who provide him with a home and an education, but it is not until many years later that he is able to begin to open up about the traumas of his past and his fear that he is still being pursued by a man who wants to kill him. It is this fear that eventually leads him to leave Paris and flee once again, but he quickly discovers that nowhere is safe and his pursuer will manage to track him down no matter where he hides. As he takes refuge in first one country then another, Atlas forms friendships with the ancestors of the girls he will later come to adopt and who will know him as their beloved Pa Salt.

This is a book where a lot of suspension of disbelief is necessary, from the number of characters with names that are ridiculous anagrams from Greek myth – including Atlas Tanit (Titan) and his enemy Kreeg Eszu (Greek Zeus), whose parents happen to be Cronus and Rhea – to the idea that so many people with connections to Pa Salt have babies in need of adoption. The events that lead to his adoptions of Electra and CeCe are particularly hard to believe. The earlier books in the series are also scattered with metaphors, symbolism and coincidences, but they are much more heavy-handed in this book. Still, I managed to overlook those things because at this stage of the series I just wanted to know how everything would be resolved and whether the theories I had been forming about Pa Salt and the other characters were correct.

I’m not sure exactly how much input Lucinda Riley and Harry Whittaker each had into this book, but I do think Whittaker does a good job of capturing his mother’s writing style; there are only a few occasions where it feels obvious that it’s not the same author, mainly where the dialogue between the sisters doesn’t feel quite right. I don’t want to be too critical, though, because we’re lucky to have this book at all and I’m sure it must have been a difficult task for Harry. Although there are some plot holes and some questions that aren’t answered very satisfactorily, overall I was impressed by how well all the separate threads from the previous seven books are brought together in this one. My only real complaint is that there wasn’t a happier ending for one particular character. Anyone who reads this book will know who I mean!

Have you read any books completed by a different author after the original author’s death? What did you think?

The Murders at Fleat House by Lucinda Riley

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Lucinda Riley is best known for her Seven Sisters series and her other standalone dual time period novels, so The Murders at Fleat House – a contemporary crime novel – is something very different. It would have made an excellent start to a new series, but sadly that’s not to be as Lucinda passed away in 2021, leaving this book as the only example of her crime writing. It’s one of several novels she wrote early in her career, without a publisher, and it was finally published posthumously in 2022.

The novel begins with the sudden death of Charlie Cavendish, a student at St Stephen’s, a private boarding school in rural Norfolk. The cause of death is found to be aspirin, to which Charlie was allergic – a fact known to everyone else who boarded with him in Fleat House. The school headmaster, concerned about the reputation of St Stephen’s, is keen to have the incident declared a tragic accident, but the police suspect there’s more to it than that. It seems that someone switched the medication Charlie took to control his epilepsy with aspirin – but who did it and why?

Detective Inspector Jazmine ‘Jazz’ Hunter happens to be in Norfolk at the time of the death, having attempted to walk away from her police career in London for personal reasons, but she is persuaded to return to work and lead the investigation. As she begins to look into the circumstances surrounding Charlie’s death, events take an unexpected turn with the discovery of a second dead body and the disappearance of another of the Fleat House boys. The clues all seem to point towards one culprit, but Jazz is not convinced. Can she solve the mystery before the wrong person is found guilty?

Schools often make interesting settings for murder mysteries and this is no exception. However, we only get to know one or two of the children; it’s the adults – the detectives, the teachers, the staff and the parents – who are at the forefront of the story here. Jazz herself is an engaging protagonist and could have been the star of a whole series, if the author had lived to write more books. A lot of time is spent on personal storylines – a difficult relationship with her Irish ex-husband, a father ill in hospital – which sometimes detracts from the central mystery, but would be understandable if Riley was trying to round out Jazz’s character with future books in mind.

I really enjoyed The Murders at Fleat House – the worst I can say about it is that it was a bit too long and could have used some editing. Having said that, Harry Whittaker (Lucinda Riley’s son) explains in his foreword to the book why he made the decision to leave his mother’s work in its original form and largely unedited. Otherwise, I found this a very entertaining and compelling murder mystery, with a classic feel; rather than lots of blood and gore, which you often get in modern crime novels, the focus is on looking for clues, interviewing suspects and trying to unravel family secrets and complex relationships. The ending came as a surprise – I certainly hadn’t guessed the identity of the murderer or their motive!

Although I’m sorry that we won’t have a chance to meet Jazz Hunter again, I’m now looking forward to the final Seven Sisters book, Atlas: The Story of Pa Salt, which has been completed by Harry Whittaker and will be published in May. Only another month to wait!