Custody

Publishers Weekly

Women who like to read about other women's troubles will enjoy Thayer's 14th novel (after Three Women at the Water's Edge; An Act of Love; etc.), which features a novice family court judge confronting a family melodrama of her own. Just as Kelly McLeod is appointed to the Massachusetts Probate and Family Court bench, she meets and falls in love with a man whose life proves as complicated by past mistakes and present entanglements as her own. Randall Madison is battling his controlling soon-to-be ex-wife (a frigid registered nurse running for political office) for custody of their 12-year-old daughter, Tessa. Curious about her birth (she was born to a surrogate mother) and on the cusp of puberty, Tessa needs all the parenting she can get. Randall also must deal with his aging widowed father and a former lover who won't let him go quietly. Kelly is engaged to a wealthy lawyer she doesn't want to marry and must cope with her half-sister, a difficult teenager who is the daughter of Kelly's long-estranged, now-dead mother and the stepfather responsible for that estrangement. Thayer turns Kelly's easy-to-guess secret into the basis of an often engrossing tale, meticulously detailing along the way the web of court procedures developed to handle family conflicts and explaining how conflicts get resolved despite their uncomfortable fit with those procedures. Ingenuity at tackling first the court case and then Tessa's unhappy situation turns Kelly from a run-of-the-mill modern heroine into a model of negotiation. Thayer's view that motherhood requires eternal patience and parenthood an unending supply of time and money imbues the book with her trademark compassionate realism. (Nov.) Copyright 2001Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A newly appointed family court judge discovers that the male defendant in her first custody case is her secret lover-and that's only the prologue to this mix of old-fashioned romance and trendy issues like adoption, surrogate parenthood, and obsessive-behavior disorder. After setting up the major crisis facing Judge Kelly MacLeod, how she'll avoid presiding over a case involving her lover without dishonoring her role as judge, Thayer (Between Husbands and Friends, 1999) backs up to show how Kelly got herself into this predicament. After Kelly's father died in Vietnam, she was raised by her mother and her father's parents, but during Kelly's senior year in college, her mother, under the sway of her evil second husband, absconded with Kelly's inheritance. Suddenly destitute, Kelly acted as a surrogate mother to pay her way through law school, holding her newborn daughter just long enough to fall in love with her (and notice a small but crucial-to-the-plot birthmark).Years later, Kelly has become a highly respected lawyer when her mother reenters her life and renews their relationship before dying. On subsequent weekly visits to the cemetery, Kelly encounters an attractive middle-aged man visiting his recently deceased mother's grave. Although they don't exchange names at first, we know he is Randall Madison, a doctor whose soon-to-be ex-wife Anne is a rising liberal politician Kelly happens to support. Randall and Anne's adopted daughter was born of an anonymous surrogate mother (guess who) with Randall's sperm. Kelly, despite a disposable fiance, and Randall fall in love while Randall and Anne fight over their daughter. The fact that Anne is an obsessive-compulsive neurotic and a wildlyoverprotective, occasionally violent mother while Randall is a sweetheart of a dad, his marital infidelity explained as the result of Anne's disgust for sex, weakens Thayer's attempts at evenhandedness late in the story-when love and humane justice prevail. An intriguing premise undermined by heavy-handed plot manipulation and shallow people.