TANGLED MEMORIES - Jan Scarbrough
A Perfect 10
The Wild Rose Press
ISBN: 1-60154-270-4
August 2008
Paranormal Romance - Reincarnation

England in 1327, and Present Day Kentucky

Mary Adams met Dr. Alexander Dominican eight years ago. He was her doctor’s partner and was on call the night that she miscarried. After her unhappy marriage ends with her husband’s death, Mary learns that he has left her with his vast gambling debt. Alexander makes her a deal: he’ll pay her debts if she’ll agree to raise his infant daughter.

But Alex doesn’t want just a nanny for his three-month-old daughter, Elizabeth, he wants a mother. Despite her best friend Gail’s warnings, Mary agrees to the ‘business’ marriage. She’ll be Alexander’s wife in name only and adopt Elizabeth. It is only minutes after she accepts the vows of marriage that she begins to have strange dreams and visions of another Mary and another marriage.

Mary Adams flashes back to the life of Mary de Mandeville during fourteenth-century England. The teenage girl is forced to wed a 35-year-old man, Lord Alexander Mountjoy, who is in desperate need of an heir. The fourteenth-century Mary falls in love with her husband but doesn’t believe that he’ll want her as a woman, only a broodmare. Mary Adams can sense that something terrible is going to happen in the young girl’s life and begins to wonder if she was that fourteenth century girl, and if she is doomed to experience the girl’s fate.

TANGLED MEMORIES is a fantastic story that explores the possibilities of reincarnation and past lives. The story is told in first person from Mary Adams’s point of view, but the flashbacks are written in third person. This makes the book very clear and helps to keep the multiple characters straight. Mary is not the only person who has a past life. Most of the characters exist in the present and the past, but their names are not always the same as they are with Mary and Alexander. Much of the plot revolves around Mary’s struggle to identify characters in the past with their present day counterparts. She must put the puzzle pieces together in time to save herself and correct a terrible mistake made in the fourteenth century.

Alexander is a troubled man who has just lost his wife to cancer. She developed cancer while she was pregnant, and dies immediately after her daughter is born. Alexander never loved his wife, but he is troubled that he couldn’t save her life. He feels guilty that he didn’t pay more attention to her. He worries that his daughter will grow up without a mother, and he literally sets out to buy a wife and mother. Mrs. Garrity is the housekeeper who has been caring for Elizabeth since she was born. The housekeeper makes no effort to hide her contempt for her new mistress, Mary. Other present day characters include Rufus, who is a strange little man who plays nurse to Alexander’s father, Guy, who is supposedly an invalid.

The characters, setting, and plot make TANGLED MEMORIES an intriguing read. Jan Scarbrough does a great job of balancing the past and the present. She demonstrates exceptional literary skills in her ability to create dynamic characters. For an extraordinary read, I award TANGLED MEMORIES a Perfect 10.

Mel Mason