GOOD THINGS

Seattle’s version of Martha Stewart stages a comeback.

Deidre McIntosh hosts Live Simple, a local TV show for those who want to learn how to bake a perfect fruit tart or fold a napkin into the shape of a lotus flower. For five years, she’s neglected her personal life while devoting herself to the domestic arts. So when Live Simple is canceled and her gay roommate moves in with his boyfriend, Deidre’s world comes apart. She loses her apartment (the lease was in her roommate’s name) and has hardly any savings to fall back on, thanks to lousy investment advice. She needs an angel, and sure enough, one appears. Handsome Kevin Johnson picks up the tab when Deidre finds herself wallet-less at a local restaurant. Later, he bumps into an intoxicated Deidre in the elevator. Sparks fly, and the couple lands between the sheets. Not normally one for flings, Deidre is horrified the next morning. Kevin, ever the gentleman, ignores her hung-over bumbling and offers a no-strings-attached solution to her housing troubles: his country cottage near Lake Wish. Lacking alternatives, Deidre heads to the house to come up with a plan to resurrect her career. She reacquaints herself with her passion for cooking and gets a sensational idea for a new show. With renewed confidence, she is ready to head back to Seattle. But she needs someone to believe in her, and it will come as no surprise who that someone will be. First-novelist King slops together a mish-mash of ingredients to create this sugary concoction. She jumps from recipes to steamy sex scenes so quickly it will give readers whiplash.

Amateurish prose and a hackneyed plot make for literary indigestion.