Mourning Glory

by Warren Adler

Overview

Grace Sorentino has never known the good life: from childhood hardships, to a marriage that began with lofty dreams and ended with all hopes shattered.

Dealt bad hand after bad hand. Grace and Jackie, her rebellious teenage daughter, are now stuck in Florida, on the verge of poverty. Grace is underpaid and under appreciated cosmetician at Saks Fifth Avenue, and Jackie-when she is not spending her time with questionable boys-balances school and two jobs.

Just when Grace things couldn't get any worse, Grace is fired after accidentally insulting a snobby customer. However, it is a blessing in disguise. As she walks out the door, her boss offers her an invaluable piece of advice: don't look for a new job, but a vulnerable old rich widower who has just lost his wife; comfort him, and once his guard is down, seduce him.

The keys to success and fortune are not a name tag and uniform, but a new last name and a ring on your finger. Marriage should be the number-one priority. At first Grace is appalled by the idea, but as rent, car payments, and credit card bills pile up, her despair turns to desperation.

She begins looking through the obituaries for her last chance at a good life-after all, isn't that something everyone deserves?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781532982309
Publisher:	CreateSpace Publishing
Publication date:	06/17/2016
Pages:	328
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.73(d)

Read an Excerpt

"But I can still see the wrinkles," the woman said. Grace studied the woman's face, the dry, aged-parchment skin tight over the bone structure, pulled back taut like a slingshot. A broad smile, she speculated, would detach it from the skull and shoot it like a Halloween mask over the makeup counter. Grace bit her lip to keep herself from grinning at the bizarre image. She knew who the woman was by reputation, Mrs. Milton-hyphen-something, a world-class champion shopper. Clerks fawned over her as if she were the Queen of Sheba dispensing largesse to the peons. For a big commission Grace, too, could fawn with the best of them, hating the process but, like the rest of the salesclerks, eager to accept the rewards. Having never before waited on Mrs. Milton-hyphen-something, she saw the moment as pregnant with income possibilities. Besides, she needed something to take the edge off what had started out to be a very unpromising day. "Perhaps a bit more of this," Grace said, dabbing at the spidery corner of the woman's eyes with the brush. Even in the flattering stage light of the makeup mirror, carefully wrought to wash away the telltale clues of aging, the skin ruts could not be made to disappear. A hard and hopeless case, Grace sighed to herself, knowing it would be impossible to satisfy the woman's insistence on appearing, at least in her own mind, wrinkle free. Makeup creates an illusion, she wanted to explain, her standard lecture to women who came to her for either a new look or lessons in the art of beauty enhancement through cosmetics. For the younger women, the lesson was easier to impart. Besides, with them, she used a more magnified and, therefore, more revealing mirror,one that enlarged the pores. These younger ones who bellied up to her counter all seemed to suffer from rampant insecurity, as if they didn't truly believe in the essential beauty of youth and needed the paints and smears to feel attractive. Somehow it didn't jibe with the ideal of the modern woman currently in vogue, the contemporary ideal, the confident, independent, able-to-have-it-all female touted in the media. Oh, they were out there, all right, like Mrs. Burns, who managed the store. Grace saw them everywhere, admired their wonderful, cool arrogance, their I-don't-need-a-man-to-make-me whole-and-happy attitude. She granted hopefully that such observations could be an illusion, a false positive, and that, in reality, those cool numbers prancing about were just as insecure as she was. Fat chance. She knew in her heart exactly where she stood, one among many still barely on the sunny side of forty, an anonymous grunt in the vast army of female also-rans, the powerless majority, stuck in some weird limbo, dismissed by their more successful sisters as congenital losers, who could not, for whatever reasons, respond to the clarion of the gender's call to arms.

Editorial Reviews

Mourning Glory is a fresh,original,compulsive read. Warren Adler delivers a dark,delectable look at lust,greed,betrayal and redemption. Never have the seven deadly sins been such fun.

Judith Kelman

Hollywood interest is huge . . . this story of a glamorous grifter can't miss.
—New York Post

Neal Travis

This book is a blast and compulsory reading.

David Brown

The reader roots for protagonist Grace Sorentino,wanting her to win through and triumph in this new page-turner from the author of Random Hearts and The War of the Roses. Warren Adler's insight into people,and women in particular,plus his strong story-telling ability,make this a smashing and suspenseful read.

Barbara Taylor Bradford

"Novelist Warren Adler, whose books The War of the Roses and Random Hearts were turned into star-driven films, returns with Mourning Glory, which Hollywood will soon snap up"

-The Post and Courier (Charleston, SC), June 7, 2001

"The reader roots for protagonist Grace Sorentino, wanting her to win through and triumph in this new page-turner from the author of Random Hearts and The War of the Roses. Warren Adler's insight into people, and women in particular, plus his strong story-telling ability, make this a smashing and suspenseful read."

-Barbara Taylor Bradford, author of The Triumph of Katie Byrne

"This book is a blast and compulsory reading."

-David Brown, producer of Chocolat, The Player, and A Few Good Men

"Mourning Glory is a fresh, original, compulsive read. Warren Adler delivers a dark, delectable look at lust, greed, betrayal and redemption. Never have the seven deadly sins been such fun.

-Judith Kelman, author of Summer of Storms and After the Fall

A long-unsolved crime haunts French teacher Annabel Kendal in this compelling traditional mystery by prolific British author Fraser (The Twelve Apostles, etc.). When Annabel and her husband, Simon, get invited to her grandmother's annual birthday party and family reunion, old anxieties resurface. Worried her marriage may be floundering and by the unexpected appearance of a journalist eager to question her about the unsolved murder of her Aunt Hilary that occurred at a similar family celebration 28 years earlier, Annabel experiences once again the dreaded nightmare that has plagued her since childhood. To delve into the past could further jeopardize her tenuous position in the prestigious and proper Carlyle family, as the murderer may have been one of her own relatives, including her very French and now deceased mother. Despite growing tension as the family gathers, Annabel, now in possession of her mother's lost diaries, feels she must dispel the shadows of suspicion for the sake of her own sanity, whatever the cost. The pieces of the puzzle neatly build toward the dramatic and surprising conclusion, while the vivid South Wales, Devon coast and Cheltenham settings will delight Anglophiles everywhere. In spite of somewhat stereotypical secondary characters and a rather contrived portrait of family dynamics, this is a book readers will be reluctant to put down. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

A crude attempt at romance from Adler ("The Ties That Bind", 1994, etc.), this time about a Catholic divorcee on the skids who ensnares and then falls in love with a rich Jewish widower. Thirty-eight-year-old Grace can barely support herself and troubled sixteen-year-old daughter Jackie working at the makeup counter of the Saks Fifth Avenue in Palm Beach, Florida. When Grace gets fired, the executive doing the firing coolly suggests she look for a rich, aging husband instead of a new job-a Jewish widower, the ex-boss suggests, because Jewish men make good husbands. At first Grace is outraged, but she needs money and finds herself attending Jewish funerals. She sets her sights on Sam, a business magnate whose wife has died of cancer. In his early 60s, Sam is fit, good-looking, and well-heeled. Grace insinuates herself into his life by pretending to have done charity work with his wife, and he accepts her offer to give away the dead woman's extensive wardrobe. Soon she is at the house daily, sorting designer labels, sipping champagne with Sam, and having the best sex of her life. While charming him with her apparent honesty, Grace is increasingly guilt-stricken about the web of lies she's spun about her past. She doesn't know that Sam is also hiding a guilty secret: his beloved wife's frigidity sent him to prostitutes. Then Grace discovers that his wife secretly had a lover. As Grace falls in love with her Jewish "mark," she tries to give moral guidance to Jackie, now under the spell of a vicious, anti-Semitic skinhead. Can Sam, a kind and caring person as well as a fabulous lover, save not only Grace but her daughter from evil? Will he still love Grace even after all secrets areexposed? Glib trash, and a rather sad middle-aged male fantasy of a younger woman's desire for an older man.

Kirkus Reviews