Haunting Rachel - Kay Hooper

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Haunting Rachel - Kay Hooper

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The beautiful Rachel Grant put her heart and memories in cold storage following the disappearance of her fiancé. Her parents' sudden death 10 years later forces her to return home to settle their estate, but she finds that more awaits her than selling off furniture and signing papers. Dealing with her past is made more complicated by the appearance of the mysterious Adam Delafield. He claims to owe the estate several million dollars, but there is no mention of him or of such a large transaction in her father's papers. That would be odd enough, but Delafield is also the spitting image of Rachel's missing fiancé, long presumed dead. Rachel is naturally troubled by his looks, and further bothered by a series of accidents that are too close for comfort. Then suddenly, even her father's business associates and old friends seem to have something to hide.

Fantastic coincidences are central in Kay Hooper's previous–and most popular–novels After Caroline and Amanda. She has put her skills to good use in Haunting Rachel, despite a sometimes awkward style. Dreams, doppelgängers, and dark dealings do make for delightful reading and Hooper seems to have found her niche with this brand of romantic thriller.

From Publishers Weekly
In Hooper's fiction (Finding Laura), death is a permeable membrane, not a brick wall. The ghost of Rachel Grant's fiance of 10 years past returns to sentimental effect in the author's pale new novel of romantic suspense. Rachel was 19 when silver-haired cargo pilot Thomas Sheridan disappeared on a mysterious flight to South America. Yet a decade later, when family estate matters bring Rachel back to Virginia from her life as a designer in New York, she starts catching glimpses of a fair-haired man who has just got to be Tom. Then Rachel's car goes out of control because somebody has cut her brake line. Is the man, who calls himself Adam Delafield, the culprit or Rachel's guardian angel?or both? Adam says he has come to town to repay the $3 million Rachel's late father, Duncan Grant, lent him on a handshake, but she doesn't know whether to trust him. Ultimately, trust provides the subtext for the novel. Rachel is flanked by tough-talking men with hard-voweled names, attorney Graham Becket and businessman Nick Ross, each with his own mysterious agenda that may imperil Rachel or save her life. Unfortunately, Hooper's heroine is too vague a character to compel the reader's concern, and her story is not so much enriched by plot threads as freighted with them?hints at CIA escapades, South American dictatorships and judge-fixing are left dangling. Most of the sex, tenderness and humor are allocated to Tom's sister, Mercy, and Ross, moreover, draining the novel of much-needed emotional tension.