Malice
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Overview
In her 37th bestselling novel, Danielle Steel tells the compelling story of a woman who must struggle to overcome a shattering betrayal, and the cruelest kind of malice.At seventeen, the night of her mother's funeral, Grace Adams is attacked. It is not the first time, and a brutal crime ensues.
And to everyone's horror, Grace will not tell the truth. She is a young woman with secrets too horrible to tell, with hurts so deep they may never heal. She is also beautiful enough for men to want her no matter how much she does not want them. Whatever the outcome, Grace Adams will have to live with whatever happened during those terrible years. After a lifetime of being a victim, now she must pay the price for other people's sins.
From the depths of an Illinois women's prison to a Chicago modeling agency to a challenging career in New York, Grace must carry the past with her wherever she goes. And in healing her own pain, she reaches out to battered women and children who live a nightmare she knows all too well.
When Grace meets Charles Mackenzie, a New York lawyer, she has found a man who wants nothing from her-except to heal her, to hear her secrets, and to give her the family she so desperately wants. But, with happiness finally within her grasp, and precious loved ones to protect, Grace is at her most vulnerable-in danger of losing everything to a vicious tabloid press and an enemy from her past, an enemy bent on malice at all costs.
With rare insight and power, Danielle Steel writes this extraordinary woman's story, portraying her struggle to triumph over malice and betrayal, and to transform a lifetime of pain into a blessing for others. Revealing both the stark reality of domestic abuse and the healing power of love, Malice, is more than superb fiction. It is a piece of life.
In her 37th novel, Danielle Steel tells the compelling story of a woman who must struggle to overcome a shattering betrayal--and the cruelest kind of malice. Sexually abused on the night of her mother's funeral, 17-year-old Grace Adams surprises everyone when she will not reveal the identity of her attacker. Years later, after a lifetime of being a victim, Grace has happiness within her grasp, but a vicious tabloid and an enemy from her past threaten to destroy everything she has struggled to gain.
Synopsis
At seventeen, the night of her mother's funeral, Grace Adams is attacked. It is not the first time, and a brutal crime ensues. And to everyone's horror, Grace will not tell the truth. She is a young woman with secrets too horrible to tell, with hurts so deep they may never heal. She is also beautiful enough for men to want her no matter how much she does not want them. From an Illinois women's prison to a Chicago modeling agency to a challenging career in New York, Grace must carry the past with her wherever she goes. And in healing her own pain, she reaches out to battered women and children who live a nightmare she knows all too well. When Grace meets Charles Mackenzie, she has found a man who wants nothing from her - except to heal her, to hear her secrets, and to give her the family she so desperately wants. But, with happiness finally within her grasp, and precious loved ones to protect, Grace is at her most vulnerable - in danger of losing everything to a vicious tabloid press and an enemy from her past bent on malice at all costs.
Publishers Weekly
A beautiful woman survives misfortune only to find her happy marriage threatened by an unscrupulous press. A 10-week PW bestseller. (June)
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
A beautiful woman survives misfortune only to find her happy marriage threatened by an unscrupulous press. A 10-week PW bestseller. (June)Library Journal
This darker-than-usual tale from Steel tells of a battered woman who runs from her past. On-sale date: April 10.Donna Seaman
Steel's wheels keep on turning. The count is 37 novels, all megasellers. And the queen of the easy read still manages to vary her tabloid-based formula. Lately, she's constructed heartrending plots of suffering and redemption around such touching subjects as middle-aged love and disease; here she's gone hard-core. Grace Adams, a shy 17-year-old beauty, has just come home from her mother's funeral, and dad, a good-looking, much revered, small-town attorney, a pillar of society if you will, wants what he's been getting from his daughter, with his wife's help, for four gruesome years. Grace refuses; Dad rapes; Grace shoots Dad while he's still inside her. Grace goes to prison, where she's raped by a big blond inmate named Brenda. Dazed and confused, Grace, having served her sentence, tries to make a quiet, sexless life for herself, volunteering several nights a week at a shelter for battered women. But she is abused by a sleazy parole officer, a lecherous photographer, and then, outside the shelter, the piece de resistance: she's beaten within an inch of her life. Then she finds true love. What can be said? This is one ugly little book.Kirkus Reviews
Steel returns (after last year's Five Days in Paris) with yet another tale of suffering and redemption (this time, perhaps, with a personal edge to it, reflecting Steel's reaction to an unauthorized 1994 biography).Grace Adams overcomes, in the patented Steel manner, a series of almost biblical-level adversities. As an adolescent Grace had been repeatedly molested by her father. If she didn't submit, he would beat her mother, then dying of bone cancer. After the funeral, in a particularly violent encounter, Grace, now 17, kills him in self-defense. With almost no one to believe her story, since Dad was beloved by everybody in their small Illinois town, Grace goes to prison for two years. When she's released, she is harassed by a sleazy probation officer and drugged by a smarmy photographer, who produces some compromising photographs of the encounter. She eventually escapes to New York and gets a job at a law firm. She also volunteers at a battered-women's center, where she is attacked and brutally beaten by the husband of a woman she had tried to help. Recuperating at Bellevue, the ever-resilient Grace finds Charles, her wealthy boss, at her bedside. ("It was so unfair," he thinks. "She was so young, and so alive, and so pretty.") Inevitably, they marry, have children, and lead a perfect Steel- like existence. But when Charles runs for the US Senate, reporters uncover Grace's past. The media savage them, and Grace has a miscarriage. Steel, who was herself recently manhandled in a biography that dwelt on Steel's harsh childhood and on her marriages to two convicted felons, gets her own back against the "maliciousness" of the press ("They went for the gut every time with a stiletto"). There is an improbable, and typically upbeat, dénouement.
Once again, Steel's incantational style, a melodic and slightly hypnotic current, carries the reader swiftly through a string of god-awful clichés, outrageous events, and unlikely outcomes. For the devotee only.