Stolen Beginnings - Susan Lewis

Where is Olivia Hastings? Did she die in Italy or is she still alive and hiding from the New York ‘club’ she was involved with? What is the mysterious cover-up?

These are all questions which might never have touched the lives of Marian Deacon and her cousin Madeleine had it not been for Paul O’Connell, the handsome, charismatic writer who enters their lives at a time when the two girls are living in England’s West Country, and struggling to make ends meet.

Madeleine Deacon is an empty-headed, selfish, though extraordinarily beautiful strip-o-gram girl working in the nightspots and restaurants of Bristol. Marian Deacon, although older an more intelligent, cowers in the shadow of her cousin’s glamorous image – she sees herself as plain and faint-hearted, a woman that no man would ever look at twice. But then Paul O’Connell changes everything.

Through lying, cheating and extortion,

Madeleine finally achieves her ambition to become a sex symbol, while Marian is swept into a heartrending love affair set in the surreal, high-flying world of film production. Moving between London, Florence and New York, both cousins become embroiled in circumstances that are beyond their control, and the mystery of Olivia Hastings starts to reach for them.

Stolen Beginnings is a story of the perversity of love, a story of girls becoming women, and of how fate will always triumph over those who meddle.