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The calendar may proclaim that Winston Clark III is thirty-five years old, but everyone around him says he never grew up. He flaunts his inherited fortune, drinks hard, and keeps company with a different lady of the evening every night. He loathes every living creature except his prized Arabian stallion, and that dislike is universally mutual. People resent his use of wealth to do and get anything he wants, not least because they know that Clark money built most of their rural Illinois town and that supplying Winston's huge ranch with goods the land cannot produce guarantees their livelihoods.
The ranch also serves as both home and workplace to Benson French (Winston's much-abused foreman), Benson's housekeeper wife, Millie, and Jenny, the lovely only daughter Millie accidentally conceived nineteen years ago. Strained as their relationship is, Winston would never dismiss the French family. They have served him too faithfully. Besides, when various prostitutes turn up dead immediately after liaisons with the devilishly handsome rancher, Winston finds himself more in need than ever of their loyalty and support in his struggle to prove his innocence.
Meanwhile, Jenny French faces her own adversity. Her best childhood friend rapes her, then demands that she marry him, and promptly impregnates another woman when she turns him down. That is only her first assault. A second one leaves her infertile and traumatized. Yet as she shatters, Winston's troubles teach him the sort of gentleness Jenny desperately needs. Can love overcome class differences and a sixteen-year age gap?
Whether in the big city or the middle of nowhere, when money talks, it never shuts up. Wisconsin native Allen maintains this theme, showing that money influences those around the spender, whether for good, as when Winston arranges for his injured grandmother to receive care at an exclusive nursing facility, or for ill as when he allows two FBI agents to remain perpetually drunk on his tab even as they try to locate that same grandmother when she goes missing. But seventy-five-year-old Beatrice Clark has an invaluable fighting spirit that keeps her youthful and more than atones for Winston's shortcomings. Slangy and free-thinking, she wins the admiration of the much softer young Jenny and never displays stereotyped womanly weakness. Her strength rubs off on Jenny, who, after Joey Blake rapes her, rejects him completely, realizing that she deserves better.
A dog owner, Allen imbues Jenny with a fondness for canines, leading the character to adopt Lovey, a stray mutt who has puppies by her resident schnauzer. Winston eventually warms to the pups as part of his transformation into a decent person. As Winston learns to appreciate what Jenny loves, he ceases to objectify her and forgoes premarital, intimate relations with her, accepting her inability to bear him children. He also respects all her decisions about the arrangements for their wedding.
With its descriptions of rural and small-town life and its scandalous mystery, this book might catch the eyes of fans of Virgin River by Robyn Carr. It also evokes a hint of the past with the character of a rich benefactor supporting a town, like the books in Ann Purser's Round Ringford series. Without being preachy, the novel's story arc about a curmudgeonly reprobate who reforms may resonate with readers who long to feel appreciated in their daily lives.