About this deal
The Herald's Neil Cooper was a fan of both the actress and the character, quipping "Cowden was the only real point to Neighbours for three years in the late eighties, the only real spark of ironic life beyond the ready-made airbrushed froth. Despite being "a nightmare to work with", Paul realised that she was good at her job and kept her on. It said to me, “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; for it tolls for thee. But I will leave you with this one thought - if you are going to cheat on your partner, it pays to do your homework first! It is a tribute to the author’s skill that I was sufficiently interested in the plot line to keep reading to the end.
The characters are good, they’re mostly flawed with the exception of the delightfully gentle Marlon whose choice of reading materials earns a round of applause. Rose uses the situation to get closer to Toadie by asking him to represent her in the event of a lawsuit from Melanie.I wouldn't have made it to the end without that, even though my mind kept wandering during the denouement. It’s obvious this novel has been written with passion and as he admits himself, not all good stories can be written within the one genre. It's what happens in the industry, it made sense, it's a business, and it's all good – once I knew the character was going I wanted to know what would happen to Sonya and Toadie, we had to preserve the integrity of these characters. You abuse people you do not know, or even if you know, you do not know their true life conditions and how these conditions made these people make some uncommon decisions. In an attempt to thank him, Rose kisses Toadie, who immediately "pulls away and tells a hurt Melanie.
A loving mother and wife and a business woman who runs her own company, she's the sort of person you'd want to live next door to, who might even become your best friend. She goes to a conference in a Tokyo and, it’s the oldest cliché in the book, she meets and sleeps with one of the other attendees - James Caine, an investment banker. When she finds out that Paul set up the whole twin cities thing, she's taken by surprise – but deep down she's flattered.And suddenly her dream life becomes a living nightmare when the married man she spent one night with tells her he wants a serious relationship with her. Now other people that I’ve seen read this have said it’s got lots of shocking twists, so I’m just putting this down to being my most-read genre.