About ‘Love and Payback’ by Irene Woodbury::
Genre: Women’s Fiction, Contemporary, Psychological, Romantic Suspense
Tricia Wyatt’s life starts to unravel after she discovers her husband, Dave, cheated on her.
She soon meets Joe Daggett, a handsome, charming married man from Chicago, on Facebook, and the two plunge into a hot Internet affair. When Tricia and Joe decide to meet for a week in Las Vegas, she shows up, he doesn’t.
After a few anxious days, Joe sends a friend, Al Posey, who lives in Vegas, to take her to dinner. Tricia, who now feels rejected by both her husband and her lover, ends up in bed with Al. Two days later, her nude, lifeless body is found by a maid at Bellagio.
Love and Payback is a gripping look at how Tricia Wyatt’s shocking, mysterious death shatters, and later transforms, the lives of her family and friends. Her son dies in a grisly accident. Her best friend’s marriage crumbles. Her husband becomes obsessed with revenge and tries to destroy the lives of Joe Daggett and Al Posey. Love and Payback checks all the boxes when it comes to drama, trauma, and, ultimately, love.
‘Love and Payback’ would make an excellent movie. The book is written in third-person and I have to give the author kudos for being able to shift between the different character’s sides without it being difficult to keep up. It starts off focused on the experience of Tricia’s son one year after her death which, for me, right off the bat set it apart from other novels of similar genre. Rather than focus solely on the grieving spouse, the author delves deeply into the effects of the affairs of his parents and the subsequent passing of his mother on their child. As well, she shares what Tricia’s best friend goes through.
Going in, I thought it was going to be fairly one-dimensional, but the author has created so much depth to the characters, setting, and plot. A distraught teenage son (Austin), whose father and adult friends refuse to give details about the circumstances of his mother’s death, gets into some Catcher in the Rye reminiscent shenanigans in desperation to learn anything about what happened to the mom he was so close to. A father/husband (Dave) barely hanging on after becoming a widower and with his son’s increasingly worsening delinquency and his own business to keep afloat; his conscious guilty for having the affair that led to his wife’s passing. A best friend (Sally) since childhood unable to fully grieve for having to fight to keep her marriage together while neglecting her own mental health to comfort and care for everyone around her.
There is a lot of fantastic points to the story that I could really get into and rave about, but in case you don’t already know: I try not to give spoilers! Suffice it to say that there’s a lot going on. The author goes into the perfect amount of detail on everyone’s side of the matter, making each of them feel real. You can feel their sadness and their anger and their confussion. The height of this is shown when Dave spirals into his revenge obsession. Alongside the motivating factors of his fixation- guilt for being the cause of his wife’s untimely demise and subsequently, their son’s; the need to know the truth of the somewhat unclear death; and lonely bitterness fueling his need for “justice”- is Sally’s conflicted emotions regarding his schemes. On one hand, she understands, but on the other, she is aware of how vindictive and unhealthy it is.
Something I love about ‘Love and Payback’ is the retrospective of events. Each character seems to at one point or other consider where the real fault of Tricia’s death lies. Was it her husband cheating on her, sending her into the arms of another man? Was it this other man taking advantage of the vulnerable woman, allowing her to die while he protests blame at every step of the way? Was it Tricia herself for needing to get even with her husband? Was it her best friend not speaking up when she sensed something amiss in her relationship with the stranger? When Austin dies, this analysis only expands.
Another thing I appreciated was how everything was tied up. There’s a clear message about inevitability and allowing negativity to fester, but also strangely enough, there seems to be a subtle comment on the rather subjective and coincidental way life unfolds. Or at least that’s what I felt. In addition, all questions were not answered. Sometimes this is aggravating and sometimes it’s enjoyable. In this case, the author picked perfectly the correct info to reveal and what to leave unsaid, the exact truth blurred by unreliable narration and consuming negative thoughts to further add to the realism of the story. The only problem I had was getting into the author’s writing style, which is only a small complaint as it didn’t lead to anything being unclear and after several chapters, I did settle into it.
Get the ebook on Amazon!
(also available on Nook)
You can find the author on:
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Author Website
((Review submitted to Amazon and Goodreads))
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~Sahreth ‘Baphy’ Bowden
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