Looking for Peyton Place

By Barbara Delinsky

What does Looking for Peyton Place have to do with the novel Peyton Place? Other than that it is set in a small New England town, not much. Peyton Place was an exposé of the secrets and scandals of life in a small town. The only scandal in Looking for Peyton Place is the mercury pollution and cover-up at the local mill. True, the heroine of this story likes to imagine that the author of Peyton Place, Grace Metalious, speaks to her and gives her advice. That is pretty much just a plot device to tie this story to the original novel.
In Looking for Peyton Place, the main character Annie Barnes believes, as does the whole town, that Metalious based her novel on their town. Annie believes her mother was the basis for the main character, Allison, in Peyton Place. Annie's mother settled down in her home town and raised three daughters, Annie, Phoebe and Sabina. Annie left home and became a writer and her two sisters stayed home. Sabina got married and works at the mill and Phoebe works at her mother's dress shop.
At the start of the novel, Annie comes home after her mother has died of a mysterious illness with symptoms similar to Parkinson's Disease. Annie finds out that her sister Phoebe is now afflicted with the same symptoms as their mother. She begins to suspect that some kind of toxic substance is at work when she discovers that many folks in town have gotten ill and some have died. Annie is pretty sure that the source of the pollution is the mill.
As she starts to investigate further, Annie runs into a lot of anger and resistance. The townsfolk are convinced that Annie is writing an exposé like Peyton Place. She is even threatened by the local police and runs afoul of Aidan, one of the sons of the mill owner. She had a bad experience with Aidan in the past. Nevertheless, she carries on the investigation, with the help of an unknown informant, whom she only knows as "True Blue".
Despite being stonewalled by most of the locals, Annie becomes convinced that mercury is the reason behind a lot of the illness in town. She also finds herself falling for one of the enemy, the mill owner's other son James. She really likes James, but is he involved in his family's cover-up of the mercury pollution at the mill? She wants to trust him but she finds it hard to believe he isn't one of the bad guys.

I didn't really care for this story. I thought it was predictable and dull. I didn't feel that the story really had much connection to its namesake and that the author just wanted to capitalize on the previous novel's notoriety.

Review from Publishers Weekly.