TINSEL TOWN

In her first novel, Entertainment Tonight reporter Mann dishes up a roman clef in the Jackie Collins mold replete with Hollywood skulduggery and back-stabbing, political corruption in High Places, a fey and fragile Michael Jacksonesque rock idol, and a gorgeous and talented heroine prepared to sacrifice all to make it in the cut-throat world of celebrity journalism. As the novel opens, Christine DuRand, barely 30 years old, has just about clawed her way to the top as a Hollywood reporter. She is preparing for her greatest coup to date, an interview with the phenomenally successful but pathologically reclusive singer Roland Williams. Williams, in the meantime, is being virtually blackmailed by his unscrupulously ambitious homosexual lover into giving fund-raising concerts for the Democratic presidential nominee, for the greater glory of the lover's standing within party circles. Although the interview goes forward, and DuRand triumphantly reduces Williams to on-camera hysterics by cunningly jabbing at him about the concerts, her arch-rival, Jewel Crosse, herself a mere sleazy Hollywood reporter who will stop at nothing to get ahead, engineers a series of ploys that result in Christine losing her show and most of her heretofore burnished reputation for integrity. As the clockwork plot thickens, Republican henchmen kidnap Williams to staunch the flow of money he is making for the opposition. With the help of a former beau who has ties to the Mafia, Christine uncovers the link between the kidnapping and the President's closest aides, thereby simultaneously regaining her professional glory and vanquishing the odious Jewel. For good measure, the author also throws Christine the perfect husband, a fabulously prominent surgeon who is willing to defer to all her requirements for their upcoming dual-career marriage. Although Tinsel Town lacks the epic bitchiness of Jackie Collins' novels, it is nonetheless a deliciously adroit and readable romp behind the scenes of Lotus Land.