#Review In The Cold Light of Day by Pauline Barclay @paulinembarclay

Pauline Barclay’s characterisation and descriptive location is so skilful you feel as if you’ve stepped back in history, in this book to the sixties, and could reach out and shake hands with Bertie and Kitty and the wonderful secondary characters who serve to make the story even more believable and rounded. Meeting Bertie sweating under the ‘deceptively amiable gaze’ of one of the two owners of Raffles, you’re right there, behind the oversized mahogany desk, realising alongside Bertie that your luck might have finally run out.

Bertie, despite his habit, is likeable. He’s a gambler through and through, and you want to scream at him to stop!!, knowing that he can’t, knowing that he’s surely heading for catastrophe, that he’s likely to end up losing his hard-won business as well as the woman he loves, despite people’s assumptions he could have only married Kitty – ten years his senior, for her considerable fortune. We do wonder, did he? Will his habit drive him to temptation, to use her as well as deceive her? And deceive her he does. Kitty is sharply intelligent and independently minded within the constraints of the sixties, but her love for him and her belief in him is unshakeable – at the beginning. Sadly, Bertie, we know can only learn the lesson, that gambling is a fool’s game, the hard way. So does he lose all he’s worked so hard for? Can their marriage possibly survive when Bertie is playing with such high stakes? You simply have to read the book. Even if Bertie has finally overcome his addiction, as Kitty says, ‘deceit is a hard lesson to unlearn’. And gambling is a hard habit to kick. Will he always be a chancer? Do we want him to take one final chance? As with previous books of Pauline Barclay’s, In The Cold Light of Day, is one I would highly recommend you pick up and lose yourself in. Loved it.

Pauline Barclay brings you Emotional Passionate Moving Stories.