If I had any kind of interest or respect for Cole, I lost it when I saw the blatant mistake early on in the book where a character changes name completely. Using nearly every character to drum that point in makes me start to wonder if it is all a conspiracy. Christine has always understood this about her husband; it was one of the things that first attracted her to him. The story could have worked without Kate, but then the book wouldn’t have had that nostalgic factor at meeting Kate and Patrick again but even reading about them two was pretty boring and just felt repetitive, the story itself moves along really slowly. We are told incessantly that Christine is naive, and that she's changing whilst married to Phillip, but I skipped 200 pages of this drivel, and apart from still knowing exactly what was going on (two characters talking about drivel and the words "he hoped it wouldn't be bad" or other variations of this at the end of every chapter).

Phillip’s mother has always backed Phillip which has not been helpful to his behavior or especially to anyone else and their mental wellbeing. At Holly Brookes Children's Home, the two girls unite in the face of horrific abuse and form an unbreakable bond of loyalty. the timeline was so confusing to me, one second a character was 15 years old, jump forward just a few pages, suddenly they are 21, jump forward around 50-100 more pages, the character is middle-aged. I also love how most of her books are generational and you get to see multi generations of the same family and watch them grow as the decades pass. Despite a good storyline, the writing in this one was awful, the characters didn't come across very well and every other sentence that came out of Kate's mouth ended in "darling"!I read "The Graft" when I was a teenager and I thought it was alright, so when I did a book swap with this book, I thought it would be an easy read, but okay. Rather than showing how and why her characters change, she just suddenly has them as different people. Even though Cole is a British citizen, she belongs to the Irish ethnicity as her parents were Irish Catholic.

That way the family would have completely different feelings at the end which I would have found interesting.

This is readable fun and shows Martina is still a force to be reckon with in the crime gangster genre. If you enjoy Cole's writing I think you will enjoy this and for hardcore fans you will enjoy catching up with Kate and Patrick! I have no idea why her editor didn't pull 100 pages from this as it could only have benefited the story. The writing jarred, the characters were shallow and cliched stereotypes, and the sentiments were very repetitive.