This Book is about What??

With the title, "A Married Man", I thought I knew the whole plot from the first page. Lucy Fellowes is a young widow struggling to begin the next chapter in her life, four years after the sudden death of her husband in a car accident. A man catches her eye, and she begins to hunt him down in the neighborhood shops, grocery stores, and cafes. When her mother-in-law offers the family housing at the family estate, Lucy jumps at the chance to move closer to this cute mystery man, Charlie. "A ha!" I thought. "He's a married man. I know where this is going."

200 pages later, I was certainly swept up in the dysfunction of the extended Fellowes family, but wondering when exactly Lucy and Charlie were going to have their moment. Things on that front were progressing slowly, but predictably. In the meantime, Lucy tried to understand her place within her in-law's family, make new friends, and find a job. With such realistic characters and circumstances, I was very committed to discovering what was in store for Lucy. It no longer was about Lucy and the married man...just Lucy and her life.

It became suddenly apparent that I had let the title lead myself astray from the actual plot. Married men are everywhere in this book: her late husband; Charlie; her father-in-law; her new boss; single men who want to become married men. Which married man did the author, Catherine Alliott, mean? Where is this all going?

It would be so easy to simply say this book is chick-lit and leave it at that. The plot, however, takes so many unexpected twists and turns in the final 100 pages, becoming at times a mystery and a drama. While the book did, ultimately, end the way I anticipated, the scenes leading to this conclusion were far from what I predicted.

This is the second Catherine Alliott book I've read this summer, and I'm beginning to wonder why her books aren't more widely available in the U.S. market. Has Jodi Picoult saturated this market?