A WOMAN'S PLACE

Run-of-the-mill divorce drama from a veteran author (Shades of Grace, 1996, etc.), this featuring the owner of a wicker-furniture chain who's betrayed by her husband but adored by someone much cuter. With a business to run, two kids to see to, and a dying mother, Boston businesswoman Claire Raphael has too much on her mind to notice that her husband, Dennis, a failed venture capitalist, has been exhibiting symptoms of restlessness and envy. Dennis does capture her attention, though, when Claire returns from a business trip to find the kids gone and a summons server waiting on her doorstep. It appears that Claire is being sued for divorce and has been removed from her house and separated from her children by court order on the grounds that by working too hard and having an affair with her CEO she's an unfit mother. Readers might feel sorry for the unjustly accused Claire if she didn't feel so monumentally sorry for herself. Declaring that ``wanting it all'' doesn't make her an evil person, she flees weeping into the arms of said CEO—incidentally her husband's former college roommate, and a handsome hunk with a house on the shore besides—and, while accepting a warm, tingly but emphatically platonic hug from him (photographed through the window, natch, by her jealous husband), decides that she won't take Dennis's false accusations lying down. Enlisting the aid of a lawyer, Claire starts digging up the dirt on Dennis, while simultaneously buying, refurbishing, and furnishing a charming old lighthouse to live in (this takes only one day, so organized is she), dealing with her daughter's allergies and her son's emotional withdrawal when Dennis proves incompetentas a psychological helper, and, just for fun, indulging after all in that affair with her CEO before she brings her former husband to his knees. Therapeutic, perhaps, for readers in the throes of their own divorces, but too formulaic for others.