The Inheritance

January 3, 2000
Belle Joubert has always hated her family's illegal-arms business and has recently left Florida for Chicago to start a new and legitimate life of her own, but when her father dies, he entrusts her with a CD-ROM that contains the names of the crooks, judges and FBI agents he had to bribe to keep his business going. Drawn back into the bosom of her dysfunctional family, Belle is forced to barter the disk as ransom with the kidnappers of her brother, Tony. Hot on her heels is Sandro Marchese, the U.S. Customs investigator who seduced and abandoned Belle seven years earlier, when he worked undercover for her dad's company. Belle and Sandro's renewed relationship fails to ignite any sparks in the reader's imagination, however, and Cresswell's (The Disappearance) serviceable plot is a time-passer but never a page-turner.