Danger Zones - Hardcover

Beauman, Sally

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 044990881X ISBN 13: 9780449908815

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 1996

Synopsis

"Danger Zones is compulsively readable and utterly engrossing--one of those books which hooks you from page one until you reluctantly surrender it in the small hours of Saturday morning."
--The Times (London)
The danger zones--where sex, secrets, and sin collide--are the places that New York Times bestselling author Sally Beauman knows best . . . and explores with gripping, brilliant intensity in her new novel.
In the picture-perfect English Cotswolds, two teenage girls dressed in punk finery attend a wild midnight party. Music, drugs, and dancing are promised by the enigmatic young man known only as Star. Charismatic and cunning, a conjurer who procures heaven for a price, Star sells seduction for a living. Now he's got a pill--a White Dove--that delivers the ultimate high. And he has a plan. By dawn, one girl will be dead, the other will have vanished--swept by Star into the danger zone.
At the heart of that perilous place stands the gifted and reclusive Maria Cazarès, a couturier of originality and passion, a woman who shuns her own fame, a legend shrouded in mystery. Around her swirls rumor and counterrumor, whispers of shocking secrets and taboos broken. Fiercely shielded from celebrity's glare by Jean Lazare, her iron-willed partner--some say lover--Cazarès is surrounded only by a carefully selected few.
And the most dangerous among them is Star.
Now, as the glitterati assemble in Paris for the new collections, a fatal triangle established three decades before in sultry New Orleans is about to fulfill its tragic destiny. Two journalists, firebrand editor Rowland McGuire and investigative reporter Gini Hunter, pick up the heady scent of an unfolding scandal. And as they clash over how to cover it, their hostility ignites a sudden desperate flame of desire--a desire that, if quenched, will tilt their universe.
Against the pounding beat and dazzling colors on the runway as the world waits breathless for the new Cazarès collection, the search for a missing innocent will reach its pulsingly suspenseful climax. At last, blood red truths will be revealed . . . as the author of Destiny sweeps us into the Danger Zones, where no heart is safe.

About this title

From the Back Cover

"ENGROSSING."
--Affaire de Coeur

"A gem in the genre: enough sex, backstabbing, and underworld dealing to satisfy the most demanding fans. . . . Bestselling romancer Beauman pushes all the right buttons in this thriller."
--Kirkus Reviews

"[Beauman's] plots are intelligent, her cosmopolitan glamour genuinely lustrous, and her characters multidimensional."
--Booklist

From Kirkus Reviews

Bestselling romancer Beauman pushes all the right buttons in this thriller that reintroduces the two protagonists of Lovers and Liars (1994), albeit in supporting roles. A mysterious new drug called White Dove, and the evil figure who dispenses it--an equally mysterious young man known only as Star--are at the heart of this hypermodern novel set behind the closed doors of the glitterati all across Europe. Deeply involved in the intrigue are fashion designer and notorious recluse Maria CazarŠs and her constant companion (maybe lover) Jean Lazare, who is witnessed acquiring a large quantity of White Dove for his own, unexplained purposes. The CazarŠs collection is soon to be shown in Paris, and fashion editor Lindsay Drummond is headed for London to assume her front-row seat for the show. Handsome Rowland McGuire, however, the new features editor at her paper, has other ideas: He wants Lindsay, and her friend--top-notch reporter Gini Hunter (who, with her lover, photographer Pascal Lamartine, is a Lovers and Liars carry-over)--to get to the bottom of the CazarŠs/Lazare/White Dove connection, on which he has accumulated a fat file of clippings and questions. Two teenage girls disappear from a rave staged by Star in rural England. One later turns up dead, and the search for Mina, the other, last seen leaving the party with Star, becomes entangled with the sordid fringes of the fashion world; eventually, it is McGuire himself, with Gini as a partner, who undertakes an investigation that could rip the lid off the White Dove conspiracy. Sparks fly between McGuire and Gini as they hunt for Mina, Star, and the keys to all of the mysteries, but it takes the involvement of Lindsay's best friend, fashion photographer Steve Markov, to set the wheels of justice in motion. Certainly tawdry, undeniably silly at times, but, overall, a gem in the genre: enough sex, backstabbing, and underworld dealing to satisfy the most demanding fans. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 044990881X
• ISBN 13: 9780449908815
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 424