Book Talk: Sandra Brown, ‘White Hot’

I’m not sure if Sandra Brown knows how to write a novel without at least one steamy sex scene. She is the counterpoint to John Grisham who probably couldn’t write a sex scene if his life depended upon it. But the thing that gets me about Sandra Brown is that she writes great novels, wonderful plots, believable characters. I’ve read many of her books, and find the blow-by-blow scenes of carnal intimacy to be irrelevant. After I finished a few of her novels, I learned to spot the presence these inconsequential scenes in the opening few words of a paragraph, then I skip to the next paragraph. If the couple is still at it, I skip to the next. And so on. This keeps me from being distracted from the author’s elegant plots.

In “White Hot” (2004, 432 pages in hardback format), Sayre Lynch (nee, Hoyle) returns home to Destiny, Louisiana. Ten years earlier, she vowed to leave and never return. She built a thriving business as an interior decorator in San Francisco and was doing well. But when she learns that her younger brother Danny has committed suicide, she feels obligated to attend his funeral. In her estimation, he was the only decent Hoyle.

Her father, Huff Hoyle, is the tyrannical owner of a factory that manufactures metal pipe, and Destiny is a one-company town. Her older brother Chris is practically a clone of Huff, although most of his time is spent drinking and romancing the ladies, including the wives of the factory workers.