Love, Sex, and Murder - Hardcover

Cameron, Sue

2.62

13 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0446518522 ISBN 13: 9780446518529

Publisher: Grand Central Pub, 1996

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As a child, she had found her mother murdered in her bedroom, and now as an adult, Nikki Easterly begins investigating the crime using the Internet and becomes involved in an online relationship with a sadomasochistic man who knows something about her mother's murder.

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From Kirkus Reviews:

Stunning improvement over gossip maven Cameron's first novel, Honey Dust (1993), though staying in the same starry venue. Despite her trashy title, Cameron leaps from bedsheet sniffer to first-class commercial novelist. When top Hollywood star Lauren Laverty (as beloved as Marilyn Monroe) is tied to her four-poster, raped and murdered, her six-year-old daughter, Nikki, is the first to find the body. Twenty years later, Nikki joins the entertainment law firm of her late mother's fianc‚, Mark Ferguson, who treats her like a doting father. Nikki has at last buried black years of nightmares about her mother, but at the cost of keeping all men at arm's length. She detests entertainment law, so ``uncle'' Mark gives her a case that may release a young prisoner who has already served ten years for murder. DNA tests now prove his innocence. But Nikki's appeals in the California courts are denied; at last the Supreme Court itself allows her to plead the case. Ironically, Nikki discovers that DNA tests on the man imprisoned for her own mother's murder now prove him innocent. Then, while cruising in cyberspace, she inadvertently stumbles across the path of The Master, the real murderer. The climax: Nikki faces the nine justices of the Supreme Court, then The Master. Outstanding here are a gripping story, characters you can almost talk with, convincing business, legal, and computer detail, an immense variety of restaurants and mansions described with gusto, a playing down of melodrama (one murder on the first page, one gun drawn in the last chapter), and the tying of the novel's many steamy passages straight into the plot. Forget likenesses to such books as Grisham's The Pelican Brief, or films like Altman's The Player and Sandra Bullock's The Net. Entertainment law and the Hollywood power game here fall under the lens of a graphic intelligence that will keep you up like a pot of caffeine. -- Copyright �1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

Cameron (Honey Dust) comes on like Jackie Collins on smart drugs in this glitzy slice of California sleaze. The murder of the title arrives first, when Nikki Easterly, six, finds her celebrated actress mother bound to the bedposts, dead. Only after Nikki grows up into a 25-year-old Hollywood lawyer does the sex?kinky or odd enough to include a man who barks while making love?kick in. Despite top billing, however, love is in short supply in the desperate world Cameron depicts. As she gets involved in a case that hinges on DNA evidence, Nikki turns up evidence that tears open the wound of her mother's murder. Now hunting both the real killer and the father she never knew, Nikki, who's terrified of intimacy, discovers the world of online sex. During her forays as the virtual vixen Rough Me Up, she comes under the spell of The Master, a sadomasochist who turns out to play a role in her twin quests. Cameron's storytelling is swift and sure, and her authoritative details of the ways and mores of the dream factories of both cyberspace and La La Land seem to carry the stamp of experience. Faye Resnick has blurbed this novel ("I liked her ending better than real life"); so have Victoria Principal ("exciting") and Kim Novak ("murder.... sensuality.... I love them both"). Will readers who don't know that Cameron edits the Hollywood gossip sheet Beverly Hills 213 share the excitement? Yes, if they're looking for a power walk on the wild side.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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