Welcome back!
In Sylvia Hubbard’s Stone’s Revenge, the long-standing hatred William Stone has for the Davenport prosecutor, Ramsey McPherson is only equaled by the forbidden love he has for his crippled daughter Abigail. Hubbard weaves a complex story with family secrets, heartache, ongoing deception and pure evil. In fact, the thirst for revenge that both McPherson and Stone share is so strong; it’s hard to believe that Stone could ever truly love the offspring of a man he loathes so much.
Very early on in the novel you quickly root for William as he fights to beat several false accusations of rape and murder hurled at him not only by the town’s people but by his own family members as well. Due to the transgressions of his forefathers, he is the ultimate underdog despite his good looks and an intellect too strong to be denied. However, when his love for Abigail turns to hatred over her failure to remember a childhood promise, you come to feel betrayed by Stone. He becomes the evil, menacing character everyone already assumes he is. Despite his attempts to rape and terrorize the focus of his revenge, his victim falls in love with him and his original feelings for Abigail are rekindled. It’s hard to accept that seething hatred could turn into a fiery love affair.
All of this was too much for me as a reader to believe and I quickly found myself more interested in the competition between McPherson and Stone’s defense attorney, David Reichard, and less interested in Abigail and her sick love affair with her “misunderstood” raging lover. It was that competition that kept me reading, however, once it was resolved with forty pages left in the book, I no longer cared who was framing Stone. By the end of the novel, I was expected to believe that the thick hatred Hubbard successfully exhibited between Stone and McPherson could be diluted into a playful hostility between the two men that would just make family-get-togethers at the McPhersons’ an entertaining affair.
I appreciate Hubbard’s ability to make emotions feel so real, however it is that talent for conveying emotion that makes it so hard to believe when these deep emotions quickly shift to the opposite end of the spectrum. I find some of the scenarios she paints too soap-operaesque and unlikely to believe. With that, I give Stone’s Revenge 3 out of 5 Sable Seals.
