We value your privacy and use cookies to remember your shopping preferences and to analyze our website traffic. Uncommonly good collectible and rare books from uncommonly good booksellers. Still, there are few surprises and fewer original insights into love, loss and self-sacrifice to be found here. Find Cypress Point by Chamberlain, Diane at Biblio. It's difficult to dislike Chamberlain's well-paced tale, especially since its protagonists are such an inherently sympathetic, good-hearted lot. The novel's two narrative threads, Carlynn's past and Joelle's present, flow inexorably toward a 'twist' ending that feels contrived and predictable. Carlynn's past is revealed through a series of flashbacks: her initial discovery of her preternatural abilities, her romance with husband-to-be Alan Shire and her troubled but loving relationship with her insecure twin sister, Lisbeth. Into this tangled thicket of guilt, misery and self-abnegation comes Carlynn Shire, an elderly doctor with 'mystical' healing powers, whose aid Joelle enlists to resuscitate Mara, for Liam's sake. Mira, 22. Liam has remained a dutiful husband to his near-comatose wife, visiting her every opportunity he gets, but that doesn't stop him from sleeping with (and impregnating) Joelle in a moment of weakness. Things are particularly tricky because Mara, once a brilliant psychiatrist, suffered brain damage caused by an aneurysm while giving birth to her son, Sam.

Unfortunately, she's madly in love with co-worker Liam Sommers, who just happens to be married to her best friend, Mara. The daughter of '60s free spirits, Joelle D'Angelo is a recently divorced, naturally empathetic social worker at a coastal California hospital. Healing, be it psychological, physiological or spiritual, informs this humane but too-familiar novel from veteran writer Chamberlain ( The Courage Tree, etc.).

Cypress Point by Diane Chamberlain