Special delivery

At 59, Jack Watson owns one of the most successful boutiques in Beverly Hills, has two adult children who are the light of his life, and his choice of Hollywood’s most beautiful women. After a failed marriage in the distant past, and a brief, tragic affair years afterward, Jack has become the perfect bachelor. And he loves it.

Amanda Robbins knew Jack Watson only as her daughter’s father-in-law, an incurable playboy whom she dislikes intensely. Theirs had been a relationship based solely upon the marriage of her daughter to his son. And Amanda wants no other relationship with him. But when she becomes a widow unexpectedly, twenty-six years after she retired from Hollywood stardom to become a wife and mother, Amanda finds herself on unfamiliar ground, and is surprised to find herself both befriended by, and attracted to, Jack Watson.  Worse yet, she likes him. There is a lot more to him than she previously suspected.

Amanda’s shock at her attraction to Jack is equaled only by her children’s. Then suddenly, a startling announcement stuns both families, as Jack and Amanda are faced with an unexpected gift that neither thought possible, and with a choice that provides them both considerable challenge. But at a time in their lives when they least expect to feel that way, they not only feel young again, but are blissfully happy, in spite of the confusion, opposition, and obstacles all around them. Special Delivery is about what two people do when life gives them everything they wanted, twenty years after they expected to find it. In her 40th bestselling novel, Danielle Steel makes us laugh and cry as she touches the heart with tenderness and accuracy.

Publishers Weekly

To the many women in Beverly Hills playboy Jack Watson’s life, ‘Everything about him was irresistibly charming, even the way he left them.’ Teetering on the cusp of 60, however, the former Hollywood actor and producer, now a retailer, has sworn off serious relationships for good. Amanda Robbins Kingston, whose daughter is married to Jack’s son, can’t stand Jack. But a year after Amanda’s overprotective husband dies, Jack and Amanda meet again at a Christmas party and embark on a romance. As this thin tale of second-chance love proves abundantly, time neither dulls nor deepens the passions of Steel’s characters: these grownups simply don’t grow up. Amanda’s self-recriminations about the match (and the self-righteous objections of her daughter and son-in-law) are tiresome, and there’s not a surprise in sight, since Amanda’s autumnal pregnancy feels as inevitable as it is contrived. Worse, Steel’s ambivalence toward real-life aging will almost certainly alienate some readers. The lovers’ bodies are both, improbably, ‘splendid,’ and (right after Jack’s throwaway comment that L.A.’s beautiful people ‘make the ugly people move to some other state’) Steel fans in the homely 49 may not always agree that ‘It was easy to see why he had so much success with women.’ The happy ending is never in doubt, but the formula is starting to look tired (not to say ‘old’) and a little sad.