British author Helen Walsh's The Lemon Grove is a steamy (the adjective cannot be avoided) novel about age-inappropriate vacation lust that inverts the usual sexes. Instead of a dapper roué chasing a filly in a bikini, Walsh presents Jenn, a stacked, 40ish nursing-home manager, driven to infraction by a 17-year-old man-boy in blue swim trunks. Although current cultural mores tend to be more lenient toward Mrs. Robinson-type lechery, The Lemon Grove must still (ahem) surmount Jenn's flimsy scruples about adultery and finesse a far more verboten impediment to her holiday hots: Nathan-of-the-blue-trunks is the first love of 15-year-old Emma, Jenn's stepdaughter, inherited 14 years earlier when she married the devoted but preoccupied Greg, a minor-league professor of Romantic poetry.
The entire novel is set in picturesque Deià, Mallorca, where the Hardings have been renting a villa in the titular lemon grove for years. Jenn, who had previously seen her daughter's beau only fully clothed and slumped in the backseat of a car, arranged for Nathan's accompaniment without any lascivious forethought. Walsh establishes Jenn and Greg's status quo before unleashing Nathan's discombobulating swim-trunked presence, serving up an expat's view of Deià's local color: liquera manzana-capped meals, the lecherous and extortionate landlord, the goats that trot along the cliffs above the coastline. Sticking close to Jenn's present-tense point of view, The Lemon Grove luxuriates in atmosphere, which, if occasionally overwritten ("The melody of aromas wafts through window, mingling with the nutty scent of fig leaves that spices the breeze"), effectively conveys Jenn's appetite for stimulation. The novel's reliably frequent sex scenes--explicit, adventurous and a tad breathless--achieve their aim without provoking an excess of squirms.
The suspense of The Lemon Grove is derived not so much "will she or won't she" (the back jacket plays that hand), but from the spectacle of watching Walsh insinuate enough happenstances, pheromones, misunderstandings, yearnings, resentments and physical collisions into the narrative to sell the reader on the inevitability of a holiday attraction between a woman and her teenage stepdaughter's first major crush. --Holloway McCandless
Shelf Talker: A hot-and-bothered novel of inverted May-December romance set in Mallorca, Spain, from the Somerset Maugham Award-winning author of Once Upon a Time in England.