Spotlight

Jill M. Smith

Last year, Carole Bellacera proved that she was a talent to watch. Now she is back in a big way, with another timely, emotional and thought provoking story. Ireland's troubled history plays a key role in the totally gripping drama.
— Romantic Times

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Contemporary Irish politics, the popular music scene and thwarted romance are the key ingredients in Bellacera's passionate if over-the-top second novel (after Border Crossings). Devin O'Keefe, lead singer for an Irish rock group, was mentally and physically scarred by his youth during the "Troubles" of Northern Ireland. Although committed to peace, Devin is pressured into marriage with IRA terrorist Caitlyn McManus, who is soon sentenced to life imprisonment and tortured by the British for her role in a department store bombing. For the sake of Devin's career, his manager, Ian Brinegar, persuades Devin to lie and claim that Caitlyn died in the bombing. When Devin meets ambitious American rock journalist Fonda Blayne, sparks fly. Though she is still mourning the death of her twin brother, a policeman shot on the job, she jumps at an offer from Brinegar to travel with the band, photograph its U.S. tour and produce a "pictorial" book about it. But there is trouble ahead. Bram Gradeighy, a roadie who is in love with Devin's sister, Bonnie, harbors a mysterious secret. Fonda's 16-year-old sister, Jessie, unable to get along with their father, comes to join Fonda on tour, and becomes overly involved with another roadie. Caitlyn escapes from jail and involves Ian in arms smuggling. And the laws of the Republic of Ireland, which preclude divorce, tempt Devin into proposing to Fonda while he is still secretly married. The overstuffed plot bursts its seams toward the end, and Bellacera's dialogue tends to the mawkish, but fans of unpretentious, no-holds-barred melodrama may be intrigued. (June) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Kirkus Reviews

A hybrid second novel from Bellacera (Border Crossings, not reviewed) awkwardly mixes the sighs of a bodice-ripper with the mayhem of a political thriller, charting as it goes along the story of an American journalist who falls in love with an Irish rock star haunted by old ties to the IRA. Fonda (named after Henry, not Jane) Blayne, the newest employee of Spotlight, a rock-music magazine, finds herself doing a photo story on popular Irish rocker Devin O' Keefe. The year is 1990, and Devin, who came to fame when he performed at a Live-Aid concert in London in the '80s, is to tour the US over the summer. Born in Belfast, Devin witnessed sectarian violence firsthand when, at the age of ten, he participated in a march and saw his older brother killed. But unlike some of his compatriots, he has dedicated his life and music to nonviolence. He's well-meaning if too trusting, however, for he's in fact being used by the IRA, which diverts his contributions to charity into their own coffers in a campaign of violence that's being masterminded by Caitlyn, whom he loved and married as a student, but who's now a ruthless terrorist. Fonda, who speaks and thinks in clichés ("like a zestful quench of cool water onto a parched throat, Fonda felt the heat of Devin's lean body against hers") is soon in love, and Devin proposes marriage as the tour continues. But the IRA and its agents, some playing in the band itself, have their own agenda, and when Caitlyn, who thinks Devin is a traitor to the cause for preaching peace, learns about him and Fonda, she heads to the US to exact her own nasty revenge—and a plucky but somewhat bewildered Fonda learns moreaboutIrish politics than your average rock music journalist needs. Neither romantic nor suspenseful, really, in a crossover that tries hard but doesn't quite work.