Synopsis:
Skye Starling is overjoyed when her handsome older boyfriend, Burke Michaels, proposes after a whirlwind courtship. Skye seems, to outside observers, to have the world at her fingertips. After all, she’s smart, beautiful, enjoys a successful career as a book editor, will never have any financial worries. She comes from a wealthy family. But she has battled obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) since her mother’s death when she was eleven. As a result, her relationships have suffered.
Yet now Burke — more emotionally mature than any man she’s ever dated — says he wants her. Forever.
Except Burke isn’t who he claims to be. Oh, sure . . . Burke Michaels is his real name. But interspersed letters to his therapist reveal the truth. He’s actually happily married and the father of three children. And using Skye for his own, deceptive ends.
A third perspective, set thirty years earlier, comes from scrappy seventeen-year-old Heather. She’s determined to break things off with Burke, a bad boy classmate in the small town in which they’ve both grown up, and make a happy life for herself in New York City. Can her adolescent love interest remain firmly in her past? Or will he accompany her into her future?
Skye is on a collision course she doesn’t suspect or foresee, throwing herself into planning her dream wedding at her family’s estate as Burke’s scheme grows more twisted. But even the best laid plans can go astray. And there’s more than one way to spin the truth.
One love story. Two marriages.
Three versions of the truth.
Review:
At the center of the story is Skye Starling, a beautiful, wealthy twenty-nine-year-old editor living in New York City. She has a close-knit group of loyal girlfriends, chief among them Andie. But a long-lasting romantic relationship has eluded Skye. As she puts it, “No one wanted to date the crazy girl. But I was pretty, which meant that if I solely wanted to hook up with guys, I could.” She made an exception to her rule of not letting yourself get close to anyone for a time, thinking she might find happiness with Max LaPointe, her on-again, off-again crush. But the relationship ended badly. The men she has dated so far have been unable to handle the fact that Skye has a serious case of OCD. She is compelled to engage in certain behaviors, and medication and therapy have not succeeded in controlling those urges. For instance, she must twice tap eight times on doors before exiting rooms, counting from one to eight and back down to one, and touch and tap everything in the room constructed from wood before leaving. As an adolescent, she was subjected to cruel derision, humiliated in front of her classmates. And now she is watching her other friends’ lives progress into marriage and parenthood while she remains single. Even Andie has been with her boyfriend, Spencer, since college, although they are not yet engaged.
Everything changes one sunny afternoon in Montauk. A “quiet girls’ weekend” at an exclusive club in the Hamptons with Andie, drinks by the pool . . . and a handsome forty-six-year-old man who strikes up a conversation with them lead to a walk on the beach after Andie departs to call Spencer. “Text me tomorrow,” Skye tells Burke before entering her telephone number into his phone and leaving to join Andie for dinner. Just like that, Skye and Burke become inseparable. Within a couple of months Burke moves into her apartment with her. Before long, despite the misgivings of her closest friend, they are engaged and planning a September wedding. She is determined not to let the threatening emails she has suddenly begun to receive from Max diminish her joy at finally having found a man who loves and accepts her just as she is — Burke is not bothered by her OCD. He tells her, “I don’t want you to be ashamed of any part of yourself. I think you’re the most incredible woman I’ve ever met.” Skye has never been so happy . . .it all feels just too good to be true.
If you can find a way to make things right, you do it. And if screwing over a desperate, privileged girl is the price, so be it.
Interspersed with Skye’s first-person narrative in which she details the tragic ways in which OCD has negatively impacted her life — she was diagnosed just three months after losing her mother — and her whirlwind romance with Burke, is Burke’s diary. He writes to Dr. K, the expensive couples therapist who does not accept insurance that he and his wife, Heather, saw a few times. Dr. K suggested that Burke and Heather write down their thoughts daily in order to get to know themselves better as individuals, apart and independent from their status as long-time spouses. Burke and Heather have been married for twenty-five years, and Burke is not, as he convinced Skye, a wealth manager. When he leaves Sky’s apartment, he does not really go to a “WeWork” location to communicate with clients. Burke lost his long-time job as a data entry specialist. After his brilliant Wall Street career was cut short when he did something “bad,” he was lucky to get any job with a wealth-management firm. He’s been applying for jobs for months, with no success, while Heather is an Uber driver. Their daughter’s tuition is due and they don’t have enough cash to make the mortgage payment.
And the third narrative, relating Heather’s point of view, begins in 1989 when she and Burke were in high school. Essentially on her own, Heather cares for her little brother, Gus. Her life irrevocably changed the day glamorous Libby Fontaine answered the ad she posted in the general store offering to babysit. Libby hires Heather to look after her four-year-old son and three-month-old daughter, paying her an astronomical $15 per hour. But the fabulous Libby is not impressed when Burke drops Heather off in his rusty Chevrolet pickup, flicking his cigarette butt onto Libby’s pristine front lawn. As Heather becomes increasingly enamored with Libby and seeks to emulate her every movement, word, and thought, she is determined to leave Burke and the little town of Langs Valley behind. But Heather details how she came to regret ever meeting Libby . . . and eventually married Burke and watched her dreams evaporate. The life she is living is a far cry from the one she imagined for herself all those years ago in Langs Valley.
Too Good To Be True is more than a mystery in which a con man lures a vulnerable young woman into marriage, she eventually learns the truth, and the fallout leads to the story’s resolution. It’s a compelling character study of three damaged people and their motivations to change their circumstances. Skye is a sympathetic protagonist because, despite all the advantages she has enjoyed in her life, she has also suffered tragedy and sadness. Losing her mother at the young age of eleven was traumatic and shortly thereafter she was diagnosed with OCD, which created a panoply of complications for her both socially and emotionally. Burke is plainly more than an amoral scam artist. He expresses his deep love for Heather, devotion to his children, and genuine appreciation of and attraction to Skye. Heather is fascinating, revealing her history in a linear fashion as her timeline gradually catches up to the present day. Like Skye, she expands on the ways in which great losses and numerous disappointments have informed her choices and inspired her actions.
Lovering’s story is cleverly-plotted and engrossing. The various narratives are deftly woven together into a cohesive whole that moves at steady pace. Lovering delivers jaw-dropping revelations at expertly-timed junctures that make it impossible to put the book down until the whole truth is divulged. Or is it the truth? The narrators are unreliable, yet persuasive, enhancing the shock value of the disclosures.
Too Good To Be True is an insightful and suspenseful exploration of the power of greed, betrayal, and revenge. It’s a thoughtful and compassionate examination of the ways in which heartbreak and loss affect and influence us, the extent of our capacity to forgive, and the ways in which we are willing to compromise in the name of love. It is sure to be viewed as one of the best psychological thrillers of 2021.
Comments are closed.