Salina discovered the name of the man responsible for her father's ruined reputation, his shattered life and, ultimately, his suicide. Lyman Graves. The cold-hearted man, thirty years her senior that she just happened to be married to for the last fourteen months. Lyman was the man who was hiding her father's diary that could clear Minos Drummond's name and expose Lyman for the evil man he really was. An untimely coal mine accident put Lyman into a coma, preventing Salina from questioning him about the diary.

As if Lyman hadn't caused enough turmoil in her life, along came Paul Titus Graves, Lyman's twenty-seven-year-old son. He was just what Salina didn't need right now.

Mick, as Paul preferred to be called, was young, handsome and hated his father almost as much as Salina did. He hated the house and everything associated with it; the painful memories of a lonely childhood; the endless stream of women his father brought home nightly after Mick's mother left them. Salina was a complete surprise to him. With her beauty, her sea-green eyes and graceful ways, she soon became a temptation for him, as well.

As storms raged in the eastern Kentucky skies, Mick and Salina did all they could to avoid their own tempest. The stigma of incest, though they were no blood relation, kept them from acting on the desires stirring deep within them. His father's wife. Her husband's son. The evil man lying in a coma, suspended between life and death, stood firmly between them.

A FAMILY MATTER traverses time in the contemporary telling of the myth of Phaedra, a woman destined to love her stepson, Hippolytus--the son destined to love his father's wife. Marsha Briscoe has brought the legend forward in time, losing none of the suspense, the romance, and the burning desire from the original myth. If you enjoy a roller coaster of emotion and intrigue that builds step by step to the unexpected conclusion, A FAMILY MATTER is a must read.
Reviewed By: Marge Conrad
© July 2004