The Opportunist By Elyse Friedman Source Received from the publisher
Published by Mira on December 6, 2022
Received from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
Rating:
When Alana Shropshire’s seventy-six-year-old father, Ed, starts dating Kelly, his twenty-eight-year-old nurse, a flurry of messages arrive from Alana’s brothers, urging her to help “protect Dad” from the young interloper. Alana knows that what Teddy and Martin really want to protect is their father’s fortune, and she tells them she couldn’t care less about the May–December romance. Long estranged from her privileged family, Alana, a hardworking single mom, has more important things to worry about.
But when Ed and Kelly’s wedding is announced, Teddy and Martin kick into hyperdrive and persuade Alana to fly to their father’s West Coast island retreat to perform one simple task in their plan to make the gold digger go away. Kelly, however, proves a lot more wily than expected, and Alana becomes entangled in an increasingly dangerous scheme full of secrets and surprises. Just how far will her siblings go to retain control?
Smart, entertaining and brimming with shocking twists and turns, The Opportunist is both a thrill ride of a story and a razor-sharp view of who wields power in the world.
This was quite the page-turner, which made it a quick read for me. But it was not as comic as some reviews led me to believe. The inciting incidents are actually quite dark, and I think more could have been made of the central relationships.
It was definitely an entertaining read, but not as twisty or shocking as I’d expected, and it stops being a whodunnit around halfway through (which actually was a neat, unexpected turn). But I’m not sure that it was as sharp or insightful as the marketing makes it out to be.
But if you enjoy a story that takes aim at the rich and privileged, this is certainly a fun read.
