Review - Broken by Maggie Shayne @MaggieShayne

MY REVIEW

I have read Forgotten and Reckless, Books I and II of the Shattered Sisters series by Maggie Shayne, and loved them. I am so excited to get my hands on Broken.

Caitlin Rossi awakes after a car accident and can’t even remember her name. She may have amnesia, but she still feels a great loss and a menacing threat. I think I would be paralyzed with fear, or run away as fast as I could. I can’t imagine what it would be like. Who do you believe? Who do you trust? Especially when you meet the rest of your dysfunctional family and realize you are worth a lot of money.

I feel the danger comes from someone close, someone very close, but Maggie Shayne does throw out a red herring. I already know who ‘they’ are so that doesn’t distract me, but there are enough suspects to keep me guessing.

Caitlin has amnesia, but she still has a working brain. She is determined to get to the bottom of things. I love the character…and Dylan isn’t too shabby either. Secrets…they always come out, one way or another. Maybe that’s a good thing. They can be a heavy burden to carry.

Sure, I expect a happy ending, but I am so loving the twisty journey I will have to take to get there. Broken reads like a true crime story. A rich bitch and her money, and those who hate her. How far will they go to get it? Can’t she save her marriage to Dylan?

It’s Chapter 8 before Toni and Joey are mentioned, then they disappear…until the end. I can hardly wait to read Book IV, Hollow. I wonder how the series will end. How many sisters are there? Surely, the sisters must all come together.

AMAZON SYNOPSIS

Caitlin Rossi’s near tragic accident was no accident at all. With her memory wiped clean, she returns to a houseful of strangers who claim to be her family, and not one of them seems glad to see her. Least of all her darkly handsome husband, Dylan.

Her gothic mansion is cold and filled with secrets. One member of this hostile household wants her dead—and unless she can regain her lost memories, they might just get their wish.

***A substantially revised edition of the story originally titled Kiss of the Shadow Man***

ABOUT MAGGIE SHAYNE

I live in the teeny, tiny town of Taylor, NY, (Alliteration Alert!) though my mailing address is Cincinnatus, my telephone exchange is Truxton and I pay taxes and vote in Cuyler. All of these are at least in the same rural county in the southern hills of New York State; Cortland County. There are more cattle than people here. The nearest “big” cities are Syracuse and Binghamton and they are an hour away, in different directions, and not really all that big by most standards, though they both seem humongous to me. I look out my window to see rolling, green, thickly forested hills, wildflower laden meadows and wide open blue, blue skies. My road is barely paved. The nearest neighboring place is a 700 acre dairy farm.

My house is a big, century old farmhouse. I moved in here after my divorce in 2006. Just a little over a year later, the house, which I had named, SERENITY, burned. It was 99% gutted, and I lost my two dogs, Sally, an 11-year-old great Dane, and Wrinkles, my 14-year-old, blind bulldog. This was the culmination of my Dark Night of the soul, which had seemed to hit me all at once in 2006-2007. My mother died that year, after a 14 month battle with pancreatic cancer. She was only 60. The youngest of my five daughters had left home that same year, and while that’s not a tragedy at all, it felt like one to me. Then came the divorce. And finally there was the fire–it seemed my darkest night wasn’t quite finished with me after all. I had lost almost everything before that point, and as I poked through the wet ashes and soot the next day, I realized that I had now been stripped all the way to the bone.

No better time to start over. (And no, I didn’t come to that realization that day–there were a few days of wallowing in pity first, particularly the day after the fire, when I hit a deer and smashed up my car, which I was practically living in!)

That’s when I started to laugh. Just sat on the side of the road as the deer bounded, uninjured and carefree, out of sight, and laughed. It was just too ridiculous at that point, to do anything else!

And from there, I picked myself up, and brushed myself off, and said, okay, there’s only one way to go from here. Forward. And that’s what I did. There I was at the age of harrurmphemmph, living in my one, mostly undamaged remaining room, with a dorm-sized mini-fridge, a futon, a TV, my cat (nine lives!) and a laptop. And not much else. (Though thank goodness the room that survived the fire, was a room that had its own attached bathroom!)

Since then I have rebuilt my beloved home, which really has become my haven, my “Serenity.” I share it now with my fiancé, Lance, and we have accumulated quite the little family together. “Little” being a relative term. We have a pair of English Mastiffs, Dozer and Daisy, who weigh 203 pounds and 208 pounds respectively, and a little pudgy English Bulldog named Niblet, who is bigger than both of them, inside her mind. We also have the aforementioned cat, Glorificus (“Glory” for short,) who adores her canine pups and keeps them firmly in line. And we’ve acquired a pair of stray cats as well, a mother and son, Luna (Lulu for short) and Butters aka Buddy. Lulu showed up pregnant during a lunar eclipse, had a litter, and vanished again. We found homes for all the kittens except one. Butters. We got him fixed and kept him. A few months later, Lulu returned, again expecting. This litter was born on the “Monster Moon.” Again, all the kittens were spayed and neutered and placed in homes, and this time we got Lulu to the vet in time to spay her before the cycle could repeat.

Glory is not amused.

She has a story of her own, my old Glory cat, having been with me before the Dark Times descended, she went through it all with me, moved with me, survived the fire, and remains with me still. She’s tolerating the newcomers. Barely.

My partner is an artist, a mechanic, a welder and an inventor, and the rumors are true, he is much younger than I.

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