Pretty Maids in a Row - Hardcover

Campbell, Marilyn

3.57

107 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679427732 ISBN 13: 9780679427735

Publisher: Villard, 1994

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Five women, who thirteen years earlier had been the unwitting victims of a group of fraternity brothers playing a cruel game of seduction, form a super-secret Little Sisters' Society. 35,000 first printing. $35,000 ad/promo.

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From Kirkus Reviews:

A ripe, unwittingly riotous hybrid of sex, violence, and true love. Thirteen years ago, a few dozen men at Dominion University competed to fill ``dance cards'' recording their seduction or rape of the greatest number of coeds. Now that those women have risen to positions of power, it's payback time, as the Little Sister Society races to punish the last four offenders within legal bounds before a mysterious nutcase finishes killing them off. The pivotal Little Sister is the newest: Holly Kaufman, an environmental lobbyist who's goaded into checking out the other Sisters by the futile testimony of Cheryl Wallace, ``an award-winning poetess,'' against HUD secretary- designate Sen. Timothy Ziegler. As part of the Sisters' attempt to spark a more successful investigation of ``infamous men's magazine publisher'' Jerry Frampton, the onetime ``King Stud'' who's evidently graduated to kiddie porn, Holly plants an anonymous tip with hotshot Washington Times reporter David Wells, a legendary junior-grade stud. To her dismay, frigid Holly finds herself responding to David's deep, deep kisses, until, not many meetings later, he's making love ``to her fingers, her toes, the sensitive skin behind her knees.'' Meanwhile, Ziegler's been murdered and mutilated (a placard announces ``JUST PUNISHMENT FOR A RAPIST'' for those who miss the point of the graphic visuals)--by alcoholic FBI agent Rachel Greenley, schizoid IRS investigator Bobbi/Roberta Renquist, ``Black Widow'' corporate queen Erica Donner, or somebody outside the Sisters?--and the killer, having dispatched loutish pro footballer Billy O'Day in similar fashion, moves on to Frampton, just as Holly and David, still working at cross- purposes despite their torrid passion, converge on him. The mixture of sex-crime conventions and Harlequin romance rhetoric--a preteen's idea of steamy--produces a hardcover debut too rich for quotation. Must be seen. -- Copyright �1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

A headline-grabbing plot that draws from the Anita Hill situation, the Spur Posse in Lakewood, Calif., and the case of Lorena Bobbit is the basis of this soap opera masquerading as psychological suspense novel. "Little Sister" was a jeering sobriquet applied by 15 Dominion University frat brothers to the sometimes willing--and oft-times raped--coeds they dogged for sex, then tallied on their "dance cards." Now, 14 years after she was victimized, environmental lobbyist Holly Kaufman finds that one of her assaulters, Tim Ziegler, now a senator, has been nominated for a cabinet post. His role in the vicious game is raked up, then swiftly buried. Disgusted, Holly joins the Little Sister Society, a group dedicated to nonviolent retribution. Her fellow members are a quartet of one-note characters: Bobbi, a mousy IRS employee with a movie-of-the-week-style split personality; calculating businesswoman Erica, who has buried several husbands; Rachel, a man-hating, lesbian FBI agent; and April, a psychologist. Clearly, someone has become unhinged: first Ziegler, then other ex-frat boys, are killed in a vengeful, bloody fashion. Campbell, the author of Pyramid of Dreams and other paperback novels, tries to inject excitement with a sizzling romance between sex-shy Holly and a womanizing, arrogant reporter trailing the group, but she can't get beyond the formulaic argue-assault-apologize school of attraction. The final scene, in which the killer is unmasked, is ludicrously flat. Literary Guild selection.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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