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Contemporary Romance, Romantic Fiction Themes, Character Types - Fiction

Amanda

by Kay Hooper
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Overview

A spellbinding tale of contemporary suspense that begins with a mysterious homecoming and ends in a shattering explosion of passion, greed, and murder. And all because a stranger says her name is... Amanda.

Others have claimed to be Amanda Daulton, but now a beautiful, self-assured woman has stepped out of the shadows of the past, insisting she's the missing heiress to a multimillion-dollar fortune. One look is all it takes to assure the family patriarch that she's his beloved granddaughter. But others at the magnificent Southern mansion called Glory are not as easily convinced, others with much to lose from her sudden reappearance. Soon suspicion erupts in a chilling attempt on her life, and after the traumatic ordeal, she begins to have flashes of a nightmarish vision. What, if anything, happened twenty years ago to drive a mother and her nine-year-old daughter away from their privileged life? The struggle to find the elusive answer exposes a frightening trail of secrets—a trail that leads shockingly to the present and to the enigmatic woman who calls herself... Amanda.

When a missing heiress to a vast fortune suddenly reappears, there's good reason for suspicion. After all, others before her had claimed to be Amanda Daulton; is this poised woman the genuine article or another impostor hoping to cash in? Unlike the family patriarch, others at the Southern mansion called Glory are not so easily swayed by Amanda's claim.

Synopsis

A spellbinding tale of contemporary suspense that begins with a mysterious homecoming and ends in a shattering explosion of passion, greed, and murder. And all because a stranger says her name is... Amanda.

Others have claimed to be Amanda Daulton, but now a beautiful, self-assured woman has stepped out of the shadows of the past, insisting she's the missing heiress to a multimillion-dollar fortune. One look is all it takes to assure the family patriarch that she's his beloved granddaughter. But others at the magnificent Southern mansion called Glory are not as easily convinced, others with much to lose from her sudden reappearance. Soon suspicion erupts in a chilling attempt on her life, and after the traumatic ordeal, she begins to have flashes of a nightmarish vision. What, if anything, happened twenty years ago to drive a mother and her nine-year-old daughter away from their privileged life? The struggle to find the elusive answer exposes a frightening trail of secrets—a trail that leads shockingly to the present and to the enigmatic woman who calls herself... Amanda.

Publishers Weekly

The return of a long-missing heiress has deadly consequences in Hooper's latest. (Sept.)

About the Author, Kay Hooper

Kay Hooper is the award-winning author of Blood Dreams, Sleeping with Fear, Hunting Fear, Chill of Fear, Touching Evil, Whisper of Evil, Sense of Evil, Once a Thief, Always a Thief, the Shadows trilogy, and other novels. She lives in North Carolina, where she is at work on her next book.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The return of a long-missing heiress has deadly consequences in Hooper's latest. (Sept.)

Library Journal

SF writer Dann (The Man Who Melted, LJ 11/15/84) offers a fascinating fictionalized account of several years in the life of Leonardo da Vinci. The novel opens in Florence, where Leonardo is in love with the beautiful Ginerva de'Benci, the daughter of a wealthy merchant and the inspiration for his paintings. Leonardo and his friends, Sandro Botticelli and Niccolo Machiavelli, come across as real people living in 15th-century Florence, and the reader is drawn into court intrigues and daily Florentine life. After Ginerva is found raped and murdered and Leonardo is accused of sodomy, the action switches to Persia. Forced to leave his homeland, Leonardo becomes an engineer for the caliph, for whom his creative imagination devises inventions of destruction in the war against the Turks. This part of the novel is not as compelling as the first part. The battle scenes at times seem interminable, and the descriptions of torture and beheadings are rampant. However, the reader experiences Leonardo's excitement with the creative process and his obsession with designing a flying machine. A mixed success, then; for general collections.-Stephanie Furtsch, New Rochelle P.L., N.Y.

Roland Green

The latest addition to large-scale alternative history postulates that Leonardo da Vinci spent 148286 (a lacuna in his actual biography) in Syria, where he built for a local potentate most of the marvelous military devices now found only in his notebooks. That situation, as Dann presents it, poses a moral dilemma for Leonardo, for the untrammeled exercise of his ingenuity makes war bloodier than ever. Whether Dann really needs 496 pages to arrange and work out Leonardo's quandary is questionable. Still, they are well-researched and well-phrased pages that bring the world of the Renaissance Mediterranean vividly to life, and Leonardo da Vinci is, of course, a protagonist fit to carry any book, provided it is executed by skilled-enough hands. Dann's hands are such, thanks to many years' labor in the fantasy and sf vineyards.

Book Details

Published
August 1, 1996
Publisher
Random House Publishing Group
Pages
355
Format
Mass Market Paperback
ISBN
9780553568233

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