'Almost a Crime': It's a long, luscious guilty pleasure

Estimated read time: 3-4 minutes

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Here's my idea of heaven:

Place: A beach in Barbados.

Refreshment: A pioa colada.

Book: A deliciously fat Penny Vincenzi novel.

If you go to Barbados, you'll spot lots of Brits -- many of them glued to a Vincenzi epic. (Despite her Italian surname, Vincenzi is British.)

It's time Americans caught Vincenzi fever, because it's almost a crime she's not better known here.

I've spent two Caribbean vacations with my nose stuck in the first two novels of her fabulous Lytton family trilogy, and the concluding volume happily awaits my next trip.

Last week I vacationed at home and, sadly, never enjoyed a pioa colada or felt a sea breeze. It wasn't a total washout, however, because I gulped down Almost a Crime, the latest upper-crust Vincenzi soap opera to be published in the USA. First published in Britain in 1999, Crime begins in June 1997, just months before Princess Diana will die in Paris.

London "power" couple Octavia and Tom Fleming -- she co-owns a company that advises charities (can't she line up Di for the fundraiser?), he's a lobbyist -- have a thoroughly modern marriage. Which means that appearances aside, it isn't perfect.

She feels guilty because she doesn't feel guiltier about leaving their three kids (9-year-old twins and a teething baby) in the care of a nanny. He feels guilty (but not that guilty) because he's having an affair.

Tom's infidelity fuels Crime. This high-octane novel takes off like a turbo-charged Porsche once Octavia finds a woman's handkerchief in her husband's laundry. Who is the other woman? Tom won't say.

What lifts Vincenzi above As the World Turns silliness? These are glossy melodramas written by an intelligent, observant writer who makes her characters wonderfully complicated -- flawed, willful, deeply human, relatable. And not above doing the kinds of stupid things that provide page-turning conflict. (One complaint about Crime: Characters are always phoning one another with important news, and the recipient is either too busy or in too foul a mood to listen. Missed connections keep the Vincenzi World turning.)

The Flemings' family and friends and social circle come alive on the page, thanks in no small part to Vincenzi's zippy dialogue. I love all those Brits calling each other darling!

There's Felix, Octavia's larger-than-life widowed father who thinks she's still his little girl and is creepily jealous of Tom. Felix's lover Marianne, who is trying to avoid the pitfalls of raising two teenage daughters and juggling a new love affair. Octavia's friend Louise, who seems dangerously unbalanced after losing her baby to crib death.

Everything is outsized in Vincenzi's fiction: sex, money, personality, emotions, plot. And yet she gets all the details -- about human behavior and women's conflicted lives -- just right. It's perfect escapism. A glamorously troubled world you greedily inhabit for 627 pages. One that makes you briefly bereft that your own quiet little life is so uneventful. And then you come to your senses.

Almost a Crime

By Penny Vincenzi

Overlook Press, 627 pp., $27.95

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