A sexy, scathing insider’s view of an interior design magazine that hardly needs its murder plot to keep readers enthralled.
In this debut mystery, an ambitious young man’s rise in the magazine world is stymied by a secret history of murder and betrayal.
When Leaf Wyks, the editor of the high-end interior design magazine Inside, is found poisoned to death in her Los Angeles home, the police immediately suspect Anthony Dimora. Before Leaf abruptly fired him, Anthony was Inside’s art director and the man most likely to take her place on the masthead. Worse yet, it was Anthony who discovered Leaf’s corpse after an early morning phone call lured him to the scene. In his novel, Ross eschews the conventions of the whodunit in favor of a dishy flashback account of Anthony’s rise to the top of the interior design world and the precipitous fall that preceded Leaf’s death. Anthony was initially hired to design advertisements, but his good looks and hairy chest attracted the attention of Timmy, Leaf’s young and sexually game assistant, who, while trying to coax the new hire out of his clothes, gave up the dirt on Inside: Leaf is on the hunt for a new art director; Claret Bruin, the magazine’s publisher, has a beautiful 17-year-old son named Cole who’s notorious for seducing older men; etc. Thanks to Anthony’s singular vision and his pronounced Machiavellian streak, he finds himself working at Leaf’s side, masterminding Inside’s rise to national prominence. Meanwhile, Anthony begins to shed his sexual inhibitions, enjoying trysts with a succession of interior designers, photographers and shop boys, as he bides his time until Cole’s 18th birthday and the consummation of their burgeoning romance. To his credit, Ross manages to pack a great deal of interest and suspense into even the most technical aspects of the magazine business. When Anthony directs a photo shoot, the stakes are high, and the sexiness of the work comes through. Despite a few belabored descriptions of rooms and their furnishings, this world is so enticing that readers might nearly forget to wonder who killed Leaf Wyks and why.
A sexy, scathing insider’s view of an interior design magazine that hardly needs its murder plot to keep readers enthralled.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4922-3710-5
Page Count: 454
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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