Thief of Words
Subtitle
By John Jaffe 

     In a time of anxiety, here is a poetic, sensual tale of desire, folly, love and forgiving that updates The Bridges of Madison County brilliantly. The hero makes pictures with words of exotic locations and doesn’t need to be an aloof loner whom the heroine, in a haze of post-coital euphoric insanity, sets free to wander the world because, after all, he must not be caged. The heroine, dissatisfied with her life of routine that includes a successful career as a literary agent, falls deeply under the spell of seductive e-mails that rewrite her troubled past. But Annie Hollerman knows that words can betray as well as charm, and romantic journalist/divorced father Jack DePaul is part of a world she has succeeded in erasing from her past.

     As with all passionate love stories, there is a matchmaker in the form of the lovers’ loyal friend and Annie’s staunch defender Laura Goodbread; there are dark past secrets threatening to destroy the blissful present; there is deception, and there is a jealous rival ready to tear the lovers apart with skilled words. The boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-wins-girl-back plot seduces us, much in the way that Jack and Annie’s words enchant, for a simple reason: it works. Like Annie, we want to believe in the stories that end, “and they lived happily ever after,” the resolution of misunderstandings and the power of love and forgiveness. The romantic conventions are pleasantly familiar, but the plot really isn’t the star of the story.

     The main appeal of this sensitive novel, penned by an astute male writer are, of course, the seductive words. Words seduced Annie into committing a terrible mistake when a newspaper editor declared that she was “the aces,” and poetic love stories entrapped Jack in a past affair with classic villainess Kathleen (with the deliberately literary last name Faulkner), who later uses Jack’s tender prose as a savage weapon to destroy his happiness. More magical words, filled with the hearts and souls of perfectly matched lovers Annie and Jack, create and ending that truly staisfies