Always Six O'Clock - Hardcover

Debut suspense novel offering a sexually frank variation on Robert Nathan's novel Portrait of Jennie, with pleasing results. Sutton spent nine years writing TV's Cheers scripts. Thus, with a hero who writes a comedy series and is abetted by a tartly gay co-scripter in resolving his fantastic problem, one foresees a comedy melodrama with a second lead who does all the wisecracks. Carl Rooney, whose parents have died and who still lives in the family home in Glendale, works late with co-writer Kit, then drives home in the wee hours, only to find someone throwing gravel at his bedroom window. It's his old high-school sweetheart Jesse and, as they did 17 years ago before breaking up, they make love out back in the greenhouse. And then Carl finds that Jesse, whom he hasn't seen since high school, is mentally locked into those early years. She cant remember anything thats happened since, and acts as if they're both teenagersuntil Carl proves otherwise. The reader at first thinks this overly cute. But logic builds a real case for Jesse's lapse and, with Kit's help, they begin investigating her past. They discover that Jesse is the wife of a rich ex-chocolate manufacturer, and that she was lost at sea during a storm. Or so her husband, Martin Ackerman, and his brother Wes have said. But when Carl's ex-wife Amanda puts Jesse under hypnosis, bits and pieces of returned memory point to either Martin or Wes (or both) assaulting her. Attempts are made on Carl's life, and a further look into Jesse's past turns up her feeble-minded mother in a nursing home. When Jesse's memory fully returns, theres a variety of unanticipated revelations. Will Jesse go back to her husband? And will she ever get over Carl's dumping her during the worst moment of their teen years? Noirish whimsy offering a fleshed-out script with every element in place but Hitchcock. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Successful TV sitcom writer Carl Rooney, the hero of this light first novel of comic suspense, has been stranded by his unsatisfying single life in the home where he grew up in the L.A. neighborhood of Glendale (aka Glendull). Then his high-school girlfriend, Jesse, shows up suddenly in his backyard, throwing pebbles against his bedroom windows in the middle of the night the way she did when they were teenagers. It seems Jesse believes that they are still living in the 1970s: with the help of his writing partner, Kit, Carl learns that she was declared dead after a recent boating accident and is suffering an odd form of amnesia. Emmy winner Sutton spent nine years as a staff writer for CheersAand it shows in his glib, easy style. His characters and dialogue are better suited to TV sitcoms, in which clever one-liners compensate for sparse character development. Sutton is at his best creating the repartee between Carl and Kit and bringing the reader behind the scenes in the TV biz. The mildly entertaining plot quickly devolves into a run-of-the-mill thriller, throwing suspicion for the boating disaster onto Martin, Jesse's husband, while the grownup-stuck-in-retro-youth concept (most recently seen in Douglas Coupland's Girlfriend in a Coma) never turns into more than a one-liner.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.