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HAPPY ENDINGS by Sally Quinn Kirkus Star

HAPPY ENDINGS

By

Pub Date: Nov. 27th, 1991
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Journalist/author Quinn's sequel to Regrets Only (1986) may actually outperform its predecessor in tedium and sheer unpleasantness, as two high-profile Washington women fight it out in the name of love. Allison Sterling--the beautiful and neurotically confrontational newspaper reporter last seen weeping over the affair between her former lover, Des Shaw, Washington Bureau Chief of The Weekly, and Sadie Grey, southern-belle wife of the US President--returns to Washington from a two-year assignment in London to find the President assassinated, Des and Sadie broken up, and an irresistible offer waiting for her to take over the editorship of her paper's National division. Sterling wastes little time exchanging tears over the President with fellow journalists before she throws herself into her new job and takes up with Des again, despite her fear that Sadie may once again sink her talons into his meaty Irish flesh. She must have forgotten that the widow Sadie spurns single men; soon after the President's death, Sadie sets her sights on the married director of an AIDS research facility. When the good doctor fails to respond wholeheartedly, however, the former First Lady is forced to resort to Des, who, having married Allison, has become fair game. Sadie's confession that Des, not the late President, is the father of her youngest child secures Des's guilt-ridden presence in her bed--while Quinn tosses in such character-building plot devices as the death of Allison's newborn, a near-fatal accident for Sadie's son, an AIDS diagnosis for the current President, and the appearance of several Colombian drug dealers who threaten to murder nearly everyone in sight. Sadie and Allison may indeed grow wise enough to settle clown with the appropriate partners. But readers are likely to side with the dealers. Laborious, stilted, and--perhaps worst of all--fantastically unsexy.