LOVE, LOSS, AND HONOR

An adolescent indiscretion leads to broken hearts and sexual enslavement in Wiens' third installment of the Love, Loss, and Honor series.

Bill Schmidt and Carrie Bennett, high school sweethearts living on ranches in Washington state’s Palouse region, break up when rich vamp Willa Roberts casually seduces Bill just before graduation. Crushed, Carrie moves out East for college and, while on a vacation in Greece, has a fling with sexy crime lord Nicolas. When she tries to leave, Nicolas says that he now owns her as a concubine and forces her to continue servicing him and other men whom he loans her out to. The abuse continues until Bill, still carrying a torch, shows up to rescue her from Nicolas’ island lair; impressed by his gallantry, Nicolas lets him and Carrie go. But the pair only grow more estranged, as Carrie has grown attached to Nicolas and wants to bear his child, and Bill now considers Carrie defiled. Back in Washington, Carrie is again forced into sexual servitude when she meets Rod, who beats her, prostitutes her to other men, and forces her to make porn videos. Bill again intervenes, thrashing Rod and whisking Carrie away to her parents’ ranch, where she recovers with the help of a remorseful Willa. Romance rekindles between Bill and Carrie—and then short-circuits when Bill has a flashback to the Nicolas episode (“I…I saw a man pawing you in your slut days,” he stammers, permanently killing the mood). Danger is afoot when Nicolas’ son, Nicolas Jr., arrives incognito, scheming to lure Carrie back into thralldom once again. The novel features a lurid, implausible narrative that includes a subplot about Bill’s cousin being possessed by the soul of Bill’s long-dead father. But it’s also a penetrating exploration of the emotional dynamics of relationships, probing the yearning, hesitancy, and prickliness that arise from lingering wounds. Wiens conveys this in subtle prose that evokes rich feeling from homely details: “Carrie walked over to remove the browned slices from the toaster. Reaching across for more bread, she had to press against him for a moment. Bill’s body was fixed, immobile, yet somehow tender”). The result is a soap opera with real depth.

A vigorous potboiler combining over-the-top melodrama with psychological realism.