Love and desire and hate
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Published Reviews
Publisher's Weekly Review
This crisp, savvy romance by actress and novelist Collins ( Prime Time ) assembles a vivid array of international stage and film personalities in Acapulco in 1955, where one of them is murdered on a movie location. Tracing the lives of each, Collins returns to Paris in 1943 where Ines Dessault, age 14, plies her hooker's trade in order to survive in occupied France. Brutalized by a client, let's not give away Joan's inimitable style!/mc fascist Italian general Umberto Scrofo, she stabs him with his razor, leaving him for dead. Ines flees to England, educating and upgrading herself to ``courtesan.'' Scrofo recovers, kills a woman in Greece and earns the sworn hatred of Nikolas Stanopolis--future film director Nicholas Stone. Meanwhile Ines and Julian (``Looks'') Brooks, top British box office star, fall in love. Ines worries about her secret past and contends with rivals--Julian's blowsy wife Phoebe and precocious teenage dancer Dominique, whose eerie, sexually frustrated duenna Agathe also pines for Julian. With all the principal players gathered in Mexico, the plot takes many an engaging turn, especially when the vile Scrofo surfaces as a moneyed producer. Collins dishes up a tasty read, pleasingly seasoned with tattle and memorabilia of stage and screen. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Book Review
The star of Dynasty and the author of Prime Time (1988) breaks open a hornet's nest of romance, envy, lust, and revenge with this brisk melodrama set in Paris, London, Hollywood, and Acapulco of the 40's and 50's. ""That spring of 1943 the Gestapo seemed to be everywhere in Paris,"" Collins states somewhat disingenuously as she details Ines Dessault's adventures as a pubescent prostitute catering exclusively to Fascist officers. When Ines slits the throat of General Scrofo, a toadlike Italian who has abused her, she is forced to escape to London to avoid execution. In England, the beautiful girl soon develops an even more generous aristocratic clientele and spends her days educating herself at art museums and libraries while she waits for Mr. Right. Years pass. Ines falls in love with the married but philandering English actor Julian Brooks, then escapes with him to Hollywood, where she lives in fear of the day her new lover will discover her sordid past. Inevitably, Brooks is cast in a Hollywood blockbuster whose producer turns out to be that nasty--and alive--Italian Scrofo himself. Further complications quickly ensue: the film's Greek director realizes that Scrofo is the Fascist officer who murdered his mother during the war; Dominique, the film's French ingÉnue, decides to seduce Brooks away from the now-pregnant Ines; and Dominique's chaperone, a white-haired crone who knew and hated Ines back in Paris, schemes to murder the former prostitute in order to win the actor for herself. A merry time in Acapulco is had by all as blackmail attempts, seductions and foiled murder-plots crowd one another off the page until love and serendipity conquer all--or do they? Weightless entertainment--contrived, replete with stereotypes and often downright silly--but told with a light touch that some might find refreshing. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.