Veena’s review of The Road Home by Margaret Way
Romantic Suspense published by Zebra 31 Oct 17

The disappearance of Helena Hartman from the Hartman outback station is a case that haunted Bruno McKendrick’s father until he died.  Twenty years later Bruno walks into a party to find a woman playing the cello, as a part of the musical ensemble entertaining the party goers, who has an uncanny resemblance to the missing woman. Isabelle Martin’s life is never going to be the same again when Bruno makes her question everything she’s believed about herself.

Isabelle Martin, as it turns out, is English, daughter of scientists who immigrated to Australia with her as a young woman.  Her mother definitely has secrets to hide, but there’s no getting around the fact that unless she was switched at birth in the hospital she is her parents’ daughter.

Bruno is determined to find answers and persuades the Hartmanns to invite him and Isabelle to their outback station.  Isabelle is an identical twin (twenty years younger) to Helena. Her arrival with Bruno sets the brooding station agog as long hidden secrets are dragged into the open.   Relationships are complicated, but none more complicated and convoluted than the Hartmanns’.  Someone definitely helped Helena get away so long ago. Who has the most to hide?

This story is not a typical outback romance from the author. The suspense is really well developed. Each answer that Bruno and Isabelle find leads to more questions, until they expose a long-hidden conspiracy and coverup for multiple murders.  Is Isabelle Helena’s daughter? Then how did she come to be with the people she’s believed to be her parents all her life?

This is an excellent romantic suspense which kept me turning pages well into the night.

Grade: A

Summary:

Two lost souls end up together at a glittering soirée off the coast of Australia’s breathtaking Sydney Harbour, where long-forgotten secrets and everyday seductions collide . . .

Bruno McKendrick knows that he can win the attention of any woman he pleases. The well-to-do son of a Scottish-born father and Italian mother, Bruno is one of the most eligible bachelors in Australian
high-society. But on this night, finding love is the last thing on his mind as he makes his way through the usual crowd of movers, shakers, and hob-nobbers . . . until he lays eyes on an incomparable beauty whose face Bruno is sure he’s seen before.

Her name is Isabelle Martin—and she says she’s not who Bruno thinks she is. Still, he’s determined to prove that Isabelle is the living image of someone his late private-investigator father spent his life trying to find. Solving this twenty-year-old mystery is one challenge; the burning attraction between Bruno and Isabelle is another. As he closes in on the case and discovers a dark truth from Isabelle’s past, Bruno risks tearing her whole world apart . . . unless she will allow him to help pick up the pieces . . .

No excerpt available.