"Chills, Thrills and Romance"

The Sowing Club is a group of four and their hired hand. John, Cameron, Preston, and Dallas met in high school and started their exclusive club by getting money in all kinds of nefarious ways. They use the Internet, stock schemes as well as any other white collar crimes that they can come up with to bilk people out of millions of dollars. John claims to be unhappy and falling apart because of his wife's terminal heart condition. They all agree to a mercy killing using their hired help, Monk. Several weeks later, the other three find it was all a hoax that John used to get rid of his wife and collect her trust fund. His wife had a few tricks up her sleeve and had made a new will leaving her money elsewhere.

While attending a formal dinner, Doctor Michelle sees a man that looks deathly ill. After he throws up on her new dress, she saves Theo's life when his appendix is ready to burst. He wants to get to know the beautiful doctor but she returns to the small town in Louisiana. Little does she know that her cousin died six weeks before (wife of John) and left her a large inheritance. Theo has been a workaholic since his wife died but finds himself thinking about the lovely Michelle. On the pretext of going fishing, Theo visits her and finds that her clinic has been trashed. He calls his F.B.I. friend, Noah, and they investigate the incident. All the while, Michelle and Theo rediscover their attraction for each other.

Julie Garwood's walk on the dark side is excellent. First Heartbreaker and now Mercy, both well written and frightening books. She has romance as well as chills and thrills to make very exciting books. One of the things I like about her romantic suspense books is that she does not forget the romance. Theo is the brother of the hero in Heartbreaker.

The prologue in MERCY could have been eliminated because it did not add anything to the story; but the first line of Chapter One is powerful and catches the reader's imagination: "The first one was a mercy killing." A chilling first statement! Aside from the chills and thrills, there are quite a few amusing portions of MERCY - for example, when everyone mistakes Theo for the new football coach and some of the banter between the hero and heroine. The secondary characters are very good particularly Noah and Michelle's father. I do hope Noah gets his own story. Ms. Garwood leaves the reader with an interesting twist at the end of Mercy as well as a perfect climax. Not having ever been a huge fan of Julie Garwood, I am now solidly in her corner and looking forward to her next romantic suspense.

Reviewed by Marilyn Heyman
Posted December 21, 2001

Summary

Julie Garwood created an electrifying tour de force in her suspense-charged bestseller Heartbreaker, a "crackling good thriller" (New York Post) that pitted a relentless FBI agent against a madman in a frenzied race for one beautiful woman. Now, in this thrilling new novel, Garwood goes further down the dark road where passion and obsession meet.

Like his FBI-agent brother Nick, Theo Buchanan is devoted to his crime-Ūghting career. Only Theo works the other side of the desk as an esteemed Justice Department attorney. At a gala ceremony in New Orleans, he is suddenly struck ill and is rushed to a hospital where a brilliant and beautiful surgeon, Dr. Michelle Renard, saves his life. It is not the only life-and-death crisis that will ensnare Theo -- for he is about to uncover a ring of criminals bent on preserving their secrecy at any cost.

They call themselves the Sowing Club: four white-collar professionals whose sophisticated crimes have amassed millions of dollars in a Cayman Islands bank account. The group is bound by a pact to leave the cash untouched until they accumulate a cool $40 million. But their leader, John, has begun to lose his focus in their "all-for-one" commitment, distracted by and nearly bankrupt from his wife's grave illness. Knowing what must be done, John turns to his three friends. For the sake of the pact, their brand of crime must turn to the mercy killing of John's wife. But the line between mercy and murder quickly vanishes....

Now, in the small bayou town of Bowen, Louisiana, Theo Buchanan comes to the aid of Michelle Renard when her medical clinic is vandalized. What he discovers is chilling and deadly. As the relentless and cold-blooded Sowing Club sets out to silence Michelle, the one person who may have the information that will destroy them, Theo confronts the lies, greed, and evil that bind the lethal foursome -- and risks more than he ever has before. Michelle saved his life...now can he save hers?

With all of the storytelling power and insight into the human heart that have made her one of the bestselling authors of our time, Julie Garwood introduces readers to an unforgettable cast of intriguing characters in this new masterpiece of contemporary suspense.