THE LYRICIST

An ardent hunk pursues a skittish news-diva across three continents in this frothy romance.

Cable-news foreign correspondent Paige La Reine is, she modestly allows, “gorgeous, divine, flawless” and “stunning,” but so consumed by her career that true love eludes her. She clearly needs an intrepid man to breach her defenses, someone like Dylan Fletcher, a tall, rich, blue-eyed stud who looks great bare-chested. Paige first encounters Dylan as an anonymous ogler in the south of France; later, when he summons her to London for an interview, she learns he is the celebrated composer of rock musicals. The Q-and-A goes so well—“forcefully his mouth took mine with a passion that sent furious sensations down my spine”—that Dylan follows Paige to Los Angeles and drags her off for a glorious weekend at his ocean-front hideaway. She’s besotted with his sensitive manliness and shirtless guitar-strumming—until he fails to return a phone call with the requisite alacrity, whereupon she dumps him for the heartless bastard he has suddenly revealed himself to be. But Dylan isn’t easily put off; he’s forever popping up at chic restaurants and glamorous parties to smolder at her, forcing her into luxurious penthouses, breaking down hotel-room doors to subject her to brutal lovemaking. Finally she flees to Afghanistan to cover the war—and guess who appears at the head of a Special Forces outfit? Busch tells her yarn with a lightly lascivious tone—“he stared at my body from head to toe, sensually focusing on my breasts”—and a breezy pace. Paige is a vain featherweight—it takes a sojourn in a menacing Afghan village, the novel’s best scene, to briefly dampen her narcissism—while Dylan, an improbable cross between James Bond and Andrew Lloyd Webber, is a stentorian block. (“I thought I’d wait and then corner you when you were tired, hoping that you would not fight my indomitable spirit.”) But why worry about trifles when there’s so much sex and shopping going on?

A callow but diverting piece of fluff.