This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
REVIEWED BY KIRA SLAUGHTER
It all started as a holiday romance…
When Cat Hayes impulsively married a handsome, penniless French waiter in St Tropez, she didn’t realise she’d be widowed in just a few weeks. Neither did she know that her late husband was actually Olivier Ducasse, heir to the Ducasse perfume empire.
Invited by the Ducasse family to their glamourous French mansion, Cat finds a family in chaos. What’s more, she’s regarded with suspicion and hostility, especially by Olivier’s playboy cousin Xavier. Will she run for the hills as fast as her high heels can carry her? Or will she realise that she is exactly what this mixed up family truly needs?
This is Sasha Wagstaff’s third offering, and it’s safe to say that I’ve been waiting since the start of the year to read it. Her other two novels were excellent and she has such a knack of producing wonderfully interesting characters.
Heaven Scent is based around the Ducasse family, who are giants in the perfume industry and have enough money to go with it. Enter Cat Hayes, who, after marrying Olivier Ducasse spontaneously in St Tropez, is invited to the Ducasse chateau to meet the family. Little does she know that Delphine, grandmother and matriarch of the family, has other ideas in mind, such as getting Cat to sign some papers so that she’s excluded from Olivier’s will.
Cat isn’t the gold digger that the Ducasse family are making her out to be, she genuinely had feelings for Olivier and she married him because she loved him. It takes a hell of a long time to convince his family of that fact. Yet she finds friends in twins Max and Seraphina, who open up to Cat about their mother’s death. There are a lot of characters in the book and at first I thought it would be difficult to keep track of them all, yet I managed to grasp all of the characters and the sub plots that they were involved in.
What I liked most about Heaven Scent was the different threads it had coming off the main story. It wasn’t wholly centred on Cat but around separate members of the family, including old friend of Olivier’s, Ashton, who has feelings for Leoni, who is Olivier’s sister. It sounds complicated but it’s really not, and I defy you not to get embroiled in the whole Ducasse saga!
There are some genuinely likeable characters in the book, as well as some who you’d love nothing more than to slap if you ever met them in real life! Being set around the perfume industry, the book contains loads of interesting information about how scents are developed! As well as this, there is a brilliant twist at the end, which I have to say I wasn’t expecting but really added to the story, and as it turns out, one of the characters aren’t what they seem.
I’ll leave you with that mystery, but if you want to find out what happens purchase the book as it is one of the reads of the summer.
8/10
VISIT SASHA WAGSTAFF'S WEBSITE