Book Review: The Chance

The Chance: A Thunder Point NovelBy Robyn CarrHarlequin Mira, 2014 One of the drawbacks of novels-in-series is the sheer improbability of their settings – what we might call the Cabot Cove Syndrome, in honor of the fact that Jessica Lansbury’s indefatigable TV sleuth encountered enough murder victims in her small Maine town over the years to populate Manhattan several times over (as one dyspeptic TV critic groused while Murder, She Wrote was still on the air, “Who in their right mind would want to live within 200 miles of this bad-luck old broad?”). There comes a point when even the most jaded inhabitants of the imaginary setting would start to wonder if they hadn’t all signed up for an Italian opera and forgot to tell each other.Robyn Carr has suffered from Cabot Cove Syndrome for a long time. Her “Grace Valley” series ran to three books (so far), and her “Virgin River” series stretched on to a staggering eighteen books (I think the last one was called Inbred Impasse, but I could be wrong about that). Her new book, The Chance, is the fourth instalment in her “Thunder Point” series, in which the lovelorn and the heartbroken and the emotionally wounded all seem to fetch up in the same small town on the scenic coast of Oregon, where they eat lots of gluten, do lots of interior decorating, and eventually get their hearts untangled again.In this latest book, FBI agent Laine Carrington has come to Thunder Point to recuperate from both a gunshot wound taken in the line of duty and also some fairly heated encounters with her father back in Boston. She’s driven across country at the behest of sassy real estate agent Ray Anne Dysart (a real estate agent in a romance novel destination like Thunder Point – you’d be sassy too) in order to settle temporarily in a town where nobody knows her or her dramatic past (“When people find out I work for the FBI,” she confides, “they either ask me a ton of weird questions or they get strange, like they’re worried I’m going to do a background check on them or something”). For her part, Ray Anne is only too happy to extol the virtues of the real estate:

“When the weather gets exciting, watching the lightning over the bay is like a fireworks show,” Ray Anne said. “Around here, it’s all about the view. There are lots of views in this town. Some have the view in front, some in back, some up the hill, some closer to the water, sometimes from big houses and sometimes from little ones.”

Unbeknownst to Laine Carrington, her prediction about how knowledge of her background might affect the inhabitants of Thunder Point turns out to be more accurate than she knew, especially in the case of sweet, handsome Eric Gentry, who has exactly the kind of past it was once Laine’s job to sniff out. Much like Laine, Eric has come to Thunder Point at least in part to reinvent himself, and Robyn Carr is skillful enough to craft Eric as a young man very concerned with the shapeshifting qualities of appearance:

Eric went into the bathroom, scrubbed his hands, swiped water over his face for good measure, rinsed his mouth and gave the mirror over the sink a shot of glass cleaner. He wiped out the sink with the paper towel he’d used to dry his hands. Then he appraised himself in the mirror. He had taken off his coveralls and was wearing a mechanic’s uniform – dark blue pants, light blue shirt, Lucky’s sewn onto the shirt. His name was embroidered on the pocket. He’d opted for the new business name since he’d been feeling pretty lucky. There was a part of him that wished he were dressed as a civilian, but this was who he was – a mechanic, a body man. His uniform was clean – he always donned a jumpsuit over his clothes when he got into or under a car engine. His hands were clean, even under the nails.

That little detail about literally keeping his hands clean is just one of many such intelligent twists Carr gives her novels. The Chance throws a few well-timed and even suspenseful tangles in the path of Laine and Eric ever coming to know and trust each other; readers will get more levels and reversals in these pages than they might expect in a novel-in-series (where in-jokes and laurel-resting tend to be the rule rather than the exception).Carr builds everything to a series of satisfying conclusions, but even so – isn’t it getting a little crowded around here?