Completed on: 7/6/2015
Review Rating: 5 Stars
Reviewed By Roy T. James for Readers’ Favorite
Never Too Late by Harold J. Fischel begins with Clint Crawley, who happens to bump into his old friends at a recent reunion and is shocked by the news of an impending financial disaster, finding his business threatened by banks. One of those friends, an old flame from his high school days, Sharleen, uses her connections with the underworld in helping him. Clint’s wife dies, he meets Sharleen off and on to her husband’s annoyance, and finally, they decide to move together to start a new life in Bermuda. There they ‘continue to be a magnet for people with strange stories,’ like Ana with a disadvantaged and mentally challenged young man, Mike, or Nina, a woman rescued from a local modeling agency which actually is involved with human trafficking.
Never Too Late by Harold J. Fischel is many novels compressed into one. Quite a few of the characters, seen to be part of Sharleen’s life, can very well have an independent existence. Sharleen interacts with a variety of people from different walks of life, and in each instance the association leads to desirable inputs from her as well as happy reactions from them, establishing her strong character. With a narration that is deft and absorbing and a plot that is rich in its variety and content, I got the feeling that the eventful lives pictured in the novel finished too soon. This prompts me to say, ‘It is always too early to finish Never Too Late.’