Unexpected Blessings
by Barbara Taylor Bradford
HarperCollins $93
When a three-year-old goes missing nobody in the Harte family thinks of calling the police. It would be against family rules. The Hartes deal with everything themselves, or with the help of other clans if necessary. But no outsiders can be involved. The child's mother, Tessa, asks her sister, Linnet, for help. Linnet calls the family's retired security adviser, Jack Figg. They suspect Tessa's ex-husband, Mark Longden. 'Mark's not very nice,' one character says. 'He's nasty,' says another. Jack eventually considers bringing in the police, but before he can, Mark calls to admit that he has the child. And so the story drags from one unlikely scenario to the next. This is the third in the series about the Harte dynasty and its empire of department stores and media. The focus now is on matriarch Emma Harte's great-granddaughters, although after some old letters are discovered, the story flashes back to the 1950s.
