Strained Relations, Strained Ending

I’m not sure if I’ve ever read anything by Lisa Scottoline before but I quickly read Come Home, her latest, this weekend. I love it when the library only gives me two weeks to read three books … what a motivator. 

When I got to the acknowledgments in the back of the book, the author explained that her theme was the ties of motherhood and mothering, even when the children are not biologically your own. The mother in this story is Jill, a part time pediatrician, who has one natural thirteen year old daughter and who is about to enter into her third marriage. (Her first husband and Megan’s father died; her second husband, William, was the father of two daughters who abruptly re-enter Jill’s life after William himself dies.) So much for serial marriages, broken homes and step children in crises in America.

The step daughters are now young women, still hostile about William and Jill’s divorce. The younger suspects her father was murdered and shows up on Jill’s doorstep, drunk and needy asking for help to find the killer. (Yes, I’ve fallen off my bucket list for 2012 and am back to mysteries … well, so is the book club this month too.) Jill’s fiancee, Sam, has no use for these unexpected family ties, and the story focuses on the angles, tensions and demands of adult versus dependent child “love.”

The story is best when everyone is angry and acting out. Jill is multi-tasking as fast as she can: trying to save an infant’s life at work, discover her second husband’s hidden life of crime, fending off phony FBI agents, ignoring each daughter in turn, depending on which “pot” is boiling. Her being frazzled and unfocused on what is most important makes her an unsympathetic character.

Scottoline then tidies up the ending with her alienated fiancee returning as a new age metro sexual welcoming a doubling of the family; her renegade daughter whom she reported missing to the police in at least three states was conveniently in a government protected safe house; her angriest stepdaughter finds love with a real FBI agent who was entrapping her father; and her biological daughter ends up like Pollyanna pushing her would be boyfriend into the school swimming pool after her photo-shops a nude picture of her across the Internet. Way too contrived. Yes, Scottoline can pull on your heartstrings and give you so many traits in her heroine that one or more might resonate with a female reader, but it is overloaded, too contemporary, and manipulating.