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Review of THE KILL FEE by Laura Van Wormer (see her website)
A SALLY HARRINGTON NOVEL
Mira, November 2003
When her uncle gets an offer to buy five acres he doesn't even know he owns, he tasks Sally Harrington with the job of finding out what is going on. What she finds is a mob plan to build a huge polluting cement factory in the middle of her upper class idealic community. Sally wants to break the story, but she has problems of her own. Should she take the million-dollar a year job as a talk-show hostess, or stick with the news division, have more job security, but only own three hundred thousand? And then there's the tough choice between the hunky twenty-five year old cop/law student who loves her and the hunky fourty-something married man who she can't stop flirting with.
Sally's life gets more complicated when a reporter doing an interview with her gets clobbered in the middle of the interview and left for dead. Although the cover copy indicates that she's the suspect, she isn't (don't blame author Laura Van Wormer for this one--authors have no control over cover copy), but she does have problems because the Mafia really wants the five acres her uncle owns and will do just about anything to get it.
In an exciting action scene, Sally confronts a couple of mobsters with a huge Cadillac SUV and gets her T.V. anchor-person looks messed up. Unfortunately, that's about the only action THE KILL FEE has to offer and the story sort of fizzles out without any adequate resolution.
Author Laura Van Wormer (see more BooksForABuck.com reviews of novels by Van Wormer) is a talented writer whose effortless prose keeps the reader involved. In this story, however, I found Sally Harrington unsympathetic, wishy-washy, and given too much good fortune to be a really sympathetic heroine.
Two Stars
Reviewed 12/15/03
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