Bernadette Price has a perfect life: she’s young, beautiful, well-educated woman with a loving family and a career in modeling. Bernie is somewhat old-fashioned though and yearns to find herself a perfect man to marry. Enters Martin Day: handsome and charming, he seems like everything Bernie could ever hope for in a husband. However, her sister Belinda and their adopted brother Alex worry about Bernie’s rush to marry a man she just barely knows. And rightfully so since there’s a disturbingly dark underside to Martin’s seemingly perfect persona.
RUNWAY DREAMS: A BLACK AND WHITE AFFAIR by T. K. Ambers is a confounding novel. It begins as a romantic fantasy about the glamorous lives of rich and famous. Then, as the reader starts learning about Martin’s sinister intentions for Bernie, it looks as if the novel will turn into one of those forgettable domestic thrillers full of intrigue, passion, and paranoia that used to be all the rage in Hollywood back in the 1990s.
And then RUNWAY DREAMS introduces spousal abuse into the story. To say this causes a tonal whiplash would be an understatement. There’s nothing light-hearted about these scenes: they feel viscerally real and feature casual brutality, petty sadism, and seemingly endless humiliation. T. K. Ambers is deliberately choosing to shock her readers and I can only applaud her willingness to brave the dark turns that a marriage can take. Unfortunately, the effect of these scenes is diminished by the sheer frivolity of everything that came before them. Even worse, sticking with the tropes of a cheap thriller leads to an underwhelming conclusion to the story. Once you tap into the everyday horror of a life with an abuser, overly complicated murder schemes and villainous monologues start to feel trivial.
Does this mean that T. K. Ambers should have avoided this dark turn in her story? Heavens, no! If anything, the novel could have used more of this brutally realistic approach. As it is, RUNWAY DREAMS: A BLACK AND WHITE AFFAIR hides some pretty memorable scenes of terror inside its fluffy exterior. While the novel’s execution is far from perfect, we respect its author’s ambition.
~Danijel Striga for IndieReader