Moorewood Family Rules

Moorewood Family Rules

by HelenKay Dimon
Setting: Rhode Island
Genres: Fiction
Published on April 25, 2023
Pages: 375
Format: eBook Source: Library

One day a con man met an heiress, wooed her, married her, had two kids...and kept on conning. Jillian Moorewood is the oldest child from that meet-cute-gone-wrong marriage. The stable one. The sensible and dependable one. The one who protects and fixes. The one who went to prison to save their sorry butts. Now, thirty-nine months later, she's out and she's more than a little pissed.

Finally home she finds the scheming clan in full family fleecing mode. They all claim they didn't really agree to Jillian's previous go-legit-or-else ultimatum before she went away. They viewed it as a "suggestion" then ignored it. So, business as usual. But Jillian is done with the lies and fakery. She demands the whole messed-up crew clean up its act, and this time she's not kidding--she has the leverage to make it happen.

Problem is, her life is in shambles, but with the help of a great aunt (crooked but loveable), a bodyguard (who is a nice surprise after three years in prison), and a few allies (all working undercover), Jillian starts to put her life back together. She kicks out a few mooching relatives living under her roof, sets limits on everyone's access to the money, ducks from their various attacks, and sees if that bodyguard is maybe interested in sticking around for a while. For the first time, she's Jillian Moorewood, her own woman, and she's ready to figure out who she is.

Jillian Moorewood was the financial person for her whole corrupt family. She was diversifying their ill-gotten gains into legitimate businesses. She was trying to make them give up their thieving ways. Controlling the money is why she took the fall when they were busted. Good thing she had been covering her assets the whole time.

Now she’s back and is ready to enact the revenge that kept her going during her three years in jail. Her treacherous family isn’t going to take her decrees lying down. It comes as quite a shock to find out that she owns absolutely all of their combined assets and she’s only going to be handing out money to law-abiding citizens. Now they have to figure out how to get around her or get rid of her.

This book was fun. It leaned a little bit too hard for too long on the “I have secrets no one knows about” trope. But I could forgive it a bit because she was stringing her family along with those same secrets. It just needed a little faster pacing. Maybe getting rid of the romantic subplot would have helped.

I enjoyed the scheming and double crossing and trying to stay ahead of what everyone else was planning.