Flavour of the Month

With all the brio and brass of her best-selling debut novel, The First Wives Club, Olivia Goldsmith now turns to Hollywood – with this sharp, sassy Cinderella story, updated nineties style. Actress Mary Jane Moran – never a beauty – has just lost not only the off-Broadway role she created but also the only man she ever loved. Hollywood has stolen both, and rejected her as too fat, too plain, and at thirty-four, too old for the movie version. She has no power as an actress or a woman. After the despair and rage pass Mary Jane comes to a decision. She is determined to buy the one thing that might really change her beauty. Two years, forty pounds, sixty-seven thousand dollars, and an excruciating series of surgeries later, Mary Jane emerges as Jahne Moore – thin, gorgeous, and ready for the big time. In L.A. at last, she lands a part in TV’s hottest new series, Three for the Road. Starring with Jahne are two other beauties with pasts of their own to Sharleen Smith, raised in a trailer in dirt-poor Texas, ignorant and eager to please, an easy mark for a rogue’s gallery of Hollywood hustlers; and Lila Kyle, child of Hollywood, whose driving ambition – to surpass her famous mother in everything – will goad her to risk all in her obsessive desire to be the only star of Three for the Road. As these three “virgins” rocket into the celebrity stratosphere, their pasts resurface in disturbing, outrageous, and scandalous ways. All of them are desired – the fantasy of every man, the envy of every woman. The man who broke Mary Jane’s heart, now a successful director, pursues Jahne both to star in his new film and to become his lover. Jahne, in longing and fear, awaits his recognitionof her. Meanwhile Sharleen’s childhood traumas scream from every tabloid. Lila Kyle loses her virginity in a career move and gains the leverage to discredit the other two women. But her plan backfires, resulting in the biggest Hollywood scandal of all time, one that threatens to t