THE TOTAL ZONE (Dustjacket Included)

The dark side of professional tennis is revealed when Jordan Myles takes on teenage tennis star Audrey Armat as a client at her exclusive sports rehab facility, only to have Audrey first disappear and then turn up dead. 60,000 first printing.

In the five years since a stinging Wimbledon defeat sent her into retirement, physical therapist Jordan Myles has learned to turn a colder eye on the pro tennis tour. So she's not unduly impressed when a call from the family of 16-year-old superstar Audrey Armat sends her home to the Desert Springs Sports Science Center to start a high-pressure rehab program with Audrey. But when star-crossed Audrey and her twin brother, E.J., take off from Desert Springs after only one day, Jordan realizes she's dealing with something a lot worse than a pair of stage-mother parents--and that's even before (1) a younger rival of Audrey's is fatally wounded on the courts at Wimbledon; (2) Audrey apparently leaps to her death from the family balcony; and (3) Emilio and Corinne Armat hit Jordan and Desert Springs with a $40 million lawsuit. Audrey's anxieties mask some ugly secrets on the women's tour--and Jordan, joining forces with a shamus called the Fish, is ready to make every sacrifice to expose them. Legendary tennis star Navratilova and her co-author's expos‚ of the women's tennis scene is heavy on you-are-there bromides and dirty (very dirty) linen, light on coherent plotting, detection, and actual tennis. First of a series that has a ways to go before it's ready for the Grand Slam. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Not content with having delivered her own outspoken memoir, the tennis ace now ventures into the mystery field, with novelist Nickles's help. It's a workmanlike story, involving the mysterious disappearance of a teenage tennis whiz, the strange behavior of her horribly pushy parents and the efforts of heroine Jordan Myles, tennis veteran turned physical therapist, to find her. But the key element is the authenticity of the tennis background, shifting from Forest Hills to Wimbledon, with excursions to a racquet expert in Florida, a sports physique center in California and Madison Square Garden. Navratilova offers absorbing asides on life on the tennis circuit, the customizing of racquets and the game's sometimes weird "groupies." She even gets to create a perfect image of herself as a cool Russian-born dynamo called Mariska Storrs, who repels a stream of young challengers to her crown. Tennis buffs will lap it up, but mystery aficionados may feel that Myles, despite her pluck and her adorable dog (named after the legendary Alice Marble), is not sufficiently colorful or perceptive to become a competitive series sleuth.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.