Naomi Powell is moving up. Her accessory subscription service, Maxcessory, is growing, so she’s getting ready to move the whole team into a new office. And she has just signed a new lease on a beautiful condo in Tribeca. The Bronx-born, self-made owner of her billion dollar business is ready for more in her life. She’s moving forward from her last (bad) relationship. She’s moving on to a better future.

And then she gets a call from her past.

A woman calls from 517 Park Avenue about setting up an interview with the co-op board. Naomi doesn’t completely understand at first, as she hadn’t put in an application to live there. But she recognized the address right away.

When she’d been 9 years old, she and her mother had lived at 517 Park Avenue. Her mother had been a live-in housekeeper for the Cunninghams. Her mother had had an affair with Walter Cunningham, and when his wife confronted him about it, he lied. But worse than that, his son Oliver hadn’t said a word, even though she and Oliver had both walked in on them.

Walter’s wife had kicked them out immediately, without offering Naomi’s mother a chance to find other accommodations or even her last paycheck. Naomi and her mother survived, but her mother was never the same. She had been blackballed from working as a housekeeper again and never quite regained her spark for life.

Naomi had worked very hard to put herself through school and open her own business. Now she has the assets to be considered for an apartment in the old prewar building from her childhood. Now she’s made it. And as she waits for her interview with the representative for the co-op board, she holds her application in her hands, the one that her mother had filled out and sent in just weeks before she had died. Naomi was there for her mother, to prove that they belonged there as much as anyone else. And when the representative for the co-op board came in to interview her, it was none other than Oliver Cunningham himself.

Naomi never expected to be put through to a second interview, but somehow it happened. And then she found herself moving in, right next door to the same Oliver Cunningham who called her “Carrots” as a kid because of her red hair. Now she can show him and his father who she really is and that she’s just as good as they are.

Working at home one day, she hears noises in the hall. She opens her door and discovers an older gentleman knocking. He has on an expensive shirt and boxers. Naomi tries to ask him if he needs help, and when he turns to face her, she recognizes him immediately: Walter Cunningham, who made her life a nightmare back when she was a kid. Clearly though he is no longer than man. Naomi coaxes him into her apartment and calls Oliver to tell him that his father is safe in her apartment. She finds out that he has Alzheimers and while his caretaker is generally very attentive, Walter had taken the three minutes she needed for a bathroom break to leave the apartment.

Seeing Walter so helpless softens her feelings towards him, and watching Oliver care for him makes Naomi stop in her tracks. What does this mean for Naomi’s attraction to this new Oliver? Can she trust him? Can she trust her own feelings? And what does this mean for her future?

Lauren Layne’s Passion on Park Avenue is the first in her Central Park Pact series, and she starts the series with a bang. From page one, this novel is bursting with strong women taking Manhattan by storm. The personalities of these women move their stories forward, and though they face doubts and fears and challenges just like everyone else, they face them with grace, with intelligence, and with a strong support system of friends.

I listened to Passion on Park Avenue as an audio book, so I got to hear narrators Nancy Wu and Sean Patrick Hopkins take turns telling the stories of Naomi and Oliver. I thought Wu did a great job with Naomi’s story, but it was Hopkins who stole the book away. He brought to mind the Colin Firth as Mark Darcy vibe (that’s Bridget Jones’s Diary, if you don’t know) to Oliver that brought his buttoned up sexiness to the story. I blew through this audio book in only 2 days because it was just too hard to stop listening. I definitely recommend the audio version of Passion on Park Avenue!

Egalleys for Passion on Park Avenue were provided by Gallery Books through NetGalley, with many thanks, but I bought the audio book myself through Audible.