With its uncensored observations of the mating rituals of Manhattan's elite, Candace Bushnell's Sex and the City created a sensation, becoming an international best-seller, spawning a worldwide hit TV series, and inspiring countless imitators. Now, with the novel Four Blondes, Bushnell triumphantly returns to the playgrounds of the beautiful and powerful -- once again capturing the zeitgeist and mores of our era like no other writer. Four Blondes brings together the stories of four modern women to render a vivid portrait of New York at the millennium. Like the fiction of Helen Fielding and Melissa Bank, Bushnell's novel is a pitch-perfect chronicle of her characters' romantic intrigues, liaisons, betrayals, and victories. A beautiful B-list model finagles rent-free summerhouses in the Hamptons from her lovers until she discovers she can get a man but can't get what she wants. A high-powered magazine columnist's floundering marriage to a literary journalist is thrown into crisis when her husband's career fails to live up to her expectations. A "Cinderella" whose husband was one of the world's most eligible bachelors faithfully records her descent into paranoia in her journal as she realizes she wants anybody's life except her own. And an artist and aging "It girl" -- who fears that her time for finding a man has run out -- travels to London in search of the kind of love and devotion she can't find in Manhattan. Studded with her trademark wit and stiletto-heel-sharp insights, Four Blondes is dark, true, and compulsively readable. It's destined to be a hit among the author's legions of loyal fans and many new devotees.
Candace Bushnell made her reputation as the creator of the HBO special Sex and the City, based on her book of the same name (based in turn on her eros-intensive New York Observer column). In Four Blondes, she returns with a quartet of novellas on her favorite subject--the mating habits of wealthy sex-, status-, and media-obsessed New Yorkers. These are people for whom a million or two does not make one rich, and who consider Louis Vuitton and Prada bare necessities. Janey Wilcox, for example, is a former model who each summer chooses a house in the Hamptons--or, rather, picks up a wealthy man with a pricey rental. With one movie in her past, her "lukewarm celebrity was established and she figured out pretty quickly that it could get her things and keep on getting them, as long as she maintained her standards." Yet even Janey eventually realizes that what she's getting isn't exactly what she wants. Cecelia, on the other hand, has gotten the ultimate prize: a royal husband. Still, she finds herself descending into paranoia as the Manhattan media circus reports her every flaw. Then there's Winnie Diekes, a high-powered magazine columnist whose marriage flounders as she pushes her unambitious husband to write the book that will make him--and her--famous. Finally, in the most clearly autobiographical story, a writer gives up on the commitment-impaired men of New York and goes to London to find a husband. There she trolls for the typical Englishman--"a guy who had sex with his socks on, possessed a microscopic willy, and came in two minutes." Bushnell is famous for this sort of sexual brashness, and the book is full of her sharp wit, both in and out of the boudoir. She also clearly enjoys her characters and their misadventures, with one exception: the politically correct Winnie, with her distaste for alcohol, night life, and casual sex, inspires an odd sort of authorial contempt. Otherwise, though, Bushnell's ironic takes on the sexual foibles of the rich and famous are mordant, mischievous fun. --Lesley Reed
When the accuser becomes the accused . . .
As a dedicated district attorney, Lily Forrester presents the perfect image of a defender of justice. Only she knows the dark secret of what happened six years ago, when a desperate crisis drove her to step outside the law and exact a horrifying personal vengeance. Now her ex-husband, faced with serious criminal charges, threatens to expose her unless she compromises her most cherished beliefs to help him. A violent rapist she put behind bars is back on the streets and looking for her. Her beloved daughter seems to be the target of a dangerous madman. And Lily must call on her deepest strength to face her accusers and ensure that the values she holds most dear will triumph.
In this taut new thriller, Nancy Taylor Rosenberg displays the brilliant legal expertise and dramatic flair that have made her books classics of suspense.
Flawed heroes (or heroines) are nothing new in fiction. But Lily Forrester, the protagonist of Nancy Rosenberg's new novel, Buried Evidence, has a few skeletons in her closet that rattle alarmingly when her ex-husband threatens to open the door to her past. Unless Lily uses her legal connections (she's a Santa Barbara district attorney) to get him out of a drunken vehicular homicide charge in Los Angeles, he'll rat on her to the authorities. To further complicate matters, Lily's daughter Shana, a UCLA student, is the only other suspect in the hit-and-run incident. When her ex is murdered shortly after Lily bails him out, Shana, who found her father's body, is again a suspect. And Shana's being stalked by the psychopath who raped both her and her mother six years ago. Add a wrongful murder, a retired cop who lied to protect Lily, and a rich, handsome, successful lawyer who's still in love with her even though he knows her darkest secrets (or maybe because of them), and you have enough ingredients to keep this racy mystery moving a lot faster than traffic on the California freeways. Rosenberg has a deft hand with pacing and plot, although her characters seem varnished with a moral gloss that's as thin as their emotional complexity. The relationship between Lily and Shana seems particularly one-dimensional given the traumatic events they've shared. Lily's moral compromises are never resolved, even after her lover clears her of a murder she did, in fact, commit. But Rosenberg's fans won't quibble with the outcome, and the former prosecutor's latest suspense thriller will doubtless win her a few more. --Jane Adams
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