Twenty-five year old Venus Gilroy is about to be married. For the third time.
She met Tremaynne - gorgeous, sexy, free-spirited environmental activist Tremaynne - at Bankruptcy Court and it was love at first sight. Unlike husbands number one (forger and embezzler) and two (meeting at a strip club, however nice the flowers it turns out he didn't sent backstage, was never likely to work out well), this time it's going to work. Venus can feel it.
Her dads, biological father John (an architect) and his partner Whitman are celebrating twenty years together by being DPed - legally entering a Domestic Partnership - three days earlier, and have offered to pay for Venus and Tremaynne's honeymoon at the dad-designed luxury Pine Mountain Lodge. There's just one hitch - they're honeymooning there, too.
Okay, and the fact that Tremaynne doesn't really fit in, that mom Carolee never really got over her husband leaving her for another man, Tremaynne's secret phone calls and the disappearance of Whitman's phone, the threat of eco-terrorism at the resort, Tremaynne's new herpes... these are just hiccups.
My Three Husbands combines almost all the things I least like in this genre. The heroine is unevolved, immature and witless. She launches from one allegedly daffy adventure to the next, never learning from the past, taking no responsibility for herself, and is willfully blind to the needs of others. We're supposed to put this, and her multiple marriages, down to the trauma of an unstable childhood, but it doesn't work. I didn't like her and I didn't care what happened to her. There are technicolour characters who add nothing to the plot (Carolee is the most significant of these, but Venus's admirer - whose interest is inexplicable - is another), and a largely irrelevant secondary plot that valiantly tries to inject the base note of a thriller but fails. There really is no hero, so at least we're spared the his-disdain-masks-his-deep-and-abiding-love plot line. And the title has nothing to do with the novel. Run, run away from anything else Ms Adamson pens. - Alex
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