Book Review: Return to Retribution Bay

3 Stars

I haven’t been writing many book reviews lately because, to be honest, it takes a long time to organize my thoughts as to why I did or didn’t like a book, but something is calling me to write this one, despite the fact I hate to leave negative reviews.

This was an interesting story about the redemption of Brandon, the oldest brother of four, who left home after the death of Charlie, the youngest. It’s now twelve years later, and he’s had minimal contact with his mother, and none with his father or other siblings, in the interim. And then he’s notified that his parents have died in an automobile accident. He knows he must return home and face his family, despite the fact that if they knew what had happened the day Charlie died, they’d despise him even more than they already did.

Brandon gets leave from the army, and travels north from Perth, Australia to his family’s sheep station on Retribution Bay. The Australian setting is engaging and well-developed, and the author does a good job of characterizing the trials of earning a living in this environment, which strike me as similar to the challenges faced by modern day ranchers in the United States.

There have been changes during the time he’s been gone, of course, the most significant of which is that a young woman named Amy has been hired to manage the new campground. This venture was started to try to bring in more income, since the station has been struggling for several years. There’s an attraction between Amy and Brandon almost from the start.

It isn’t too long before they discover that the accident wasn’t an accident, but an intentional sabotage of the vehicle by cutting the brake lines. And thus starts the mystery of who did it and why.

I enjoyed most of the book as the siblings worked out their relationships while trying to figure out who killed their parents. The reasoning as to why they need to do this (this is a small town with just two police officers) is acceptable, especially when Brandon’s guilt over staying distant for so long is factored in. The romance takes a backseat to the mystery/suspense elements for a significant part of the book, which was disconcerting, but picks up toward the end so that Brandon and Amy can have their HEA.

Speaking of the end, that’s why I gave this book only three stars. There’s a principle in story structure called Chekhov’s Gun, which states that “One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off. It’s wrong to make promises you don’t mean to keep.” Or, as Anton Chekhov illustrated in The Seagull (1896), Konstantin carries a gun onstage early in the play. The same gun goes off in the final act, becoming a key element to the plot.

The corollary to this is that if you’re going to have a gun go off in the final act, it should appear earlier in the play (or novel) to establish the promise that will be fulfilled. It’s the corollary that’s missing in Return to Retribution Bay. Key elements to the resolution of threads of the story aren’t foreshadowed, but magically appear in the final scenes.

And then, to add insult to injury, in an author’s note at the end, Ms. Boston tells the reader that her editor pointed out two unresolved issues she should have resolved. And rather than reworking the novel to resolve them, she makes the excuse that she really couldn’t do that because they needed to be in future books in the series. So they turn out to be not exactly cliffhangers, because they’re neither about the romance nor the murder, but unsatisfactory endings at least.

Now, I will be the first one to admit that working the pieces you need in the final scene(s) into the beginning and middle of the book without giving away the ending is sometimes incredibly difficult. But that’s the author’s job, one Claire Boston didn’t do very well.