Friday Special Blend
Friday January 27th, 2023 with Susan Johnston
Writers Festival Radio: Steven W. Beattie interviews Elyse Friedman about her latest novel, The Opportunist

As part of our collaboration with the Ottawa International Writers Festival, we're delighted to bring you highlights from Writers Festival Radio. In this episode, Steven W. Beattie interviews Elyse Friedman, acclaimed author, screenwriter, poet and playwright. Her latest novel, The Opportunist is a sly, compulsively readable tale about greed, power and the world’s most devious family. When Alana Shropshire’s seventy-six-year-old father, Ed, starts dating Kelly, a saucy twenty-eight-year-old, a flurry of messages arrive from Alana’s brothers, urging her to help “protect Dad” from the young interloper. Alana knows that what Teddy and Martin really want to protect is their father’s fortune, and she tells them she couldn’t care less about the May–December romance. Long estranged from her privileged family, Alana has no stake in the game, and as a hardworking single mom, she has more important things to worry about. But when Ed and Kelly’s wedding is announced, Teddy and Martin kick into hyperdrive, and eventually persuade Alana to fly to their father’s 900-acre West Coast island retreat to perform one small task in their plan to lure the “gold digger” away from their father. Kelly, however, proves a lot wilier than expected, and Alana becomes entangled in an increasingly dangerous scheme full of secrets and surprises. Will she be able to escape her brothers’ elaborate web of deceit? Just how far will her siblings go to retain control?