The Boy Next Door Book

The Boy Next Door is the third offering from bestselling duo Josie Lloyd and Emlyn Rees. Their previous books, Come Together and Come Again, carved out a niche in the popular romance genre with their alternating boy/girl perspectives; and this novel uses the same device to tell the story of childhood best friends pulled apart by tragedy and reunited by coincidence. Fred Roper is a technophile: "I'm into technology, it's a compulsion and a fear." He has a cool job as a marketing manager for an online company and a hot fiancée who has an "insatiable sexual appetite". But he's not really happy. Mickey Malony, his 70s best friend, hasn't seen him in 15 years. She's also living in London, runs her own flower shop and is bringing up her young son on her own. They meet by chance in a toy superstore, and the remainder of the book is a will they? won't they? get-it-together scenario against a backdrop of their shared memories from their small town past. The novel is nice, an old fashioned romance, but with a modern twist--techno boy rekindles lost love with the down to earth flower shop girl, even the language has a love in bloom quality to it: "her short curved lip turned tender and full". The Boy Next Door is an entertaining look at first love and the way it can all gone wrong and then go right. --Eithne FarryRead More