Facade.

Kate, a gossip columnist; Jessie, wife to a rich and powerful man; Sarah, mistress of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll; and Christine, a savvy businesswoman, experience joy and deceit in Palm Beach. 75,000 first printing. Tour.

The author of The Prize Pulitzer loads this potboiler with lurid, predictable stories of sex, money and nasty secrets. Sometime in the 1980s four young women with plenty to conceal meet by chance in Palm Beach and spend the rest of the decade in an unholy alliance. Unbridled ambition leads Kate Robinson to manipulate, lie and steal her way from working as a tabloid reporter to writing bestselling books; the well-born Sarah Potter, disinherited after a deadly, cocaine-induced episode of hit-and-run, thirsts for money and uses sex to get it; respectably married Christine Wells hides her past as a London prostitute by striking a sex-for-silence deal with a local entrepreneur; and Jessie Malcolm finds happiness with a married man until her history of childhood sexual abuse takes an overwhelming toll. Despite their obvious needs for privacy, the fatal four become clients of a Hungarian psychic who foresees betrayal and death, the cornerstones of the altogether contrived ending to this heavy-handed exercise. Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club alternates; author tour.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Enjoyed meeting the hard-working, well-bred citizens of Palm Beach in the real-life William Kennedy Smith trial? Want to read even more about these delightful people? Hard-working, well-bred Palm Beach insider and novelist Pulitzer (The Prize Pulitzer, Twins) weaves her imagination together with the tabloid headlines for a tale of four young women let loose in the city of Teddy's Sexy Romp. Altruistic West Palm Beach psychic and police consultant Maria (psychics can't be bothered with surnames) is troubled by the dark visions that swirl whenever she turns her mystical attention to the four young ladies who seek her vision regularly after lunch--women who have bitten off rather more of Palm Beach life than they can chew. Something dreadful is going to happen to either ex-top-of- the-line London prostitute Christine, ex-hit-and-run driver and world-class cocaine-consumer Sarah, ex-journalist and budding plagiarist Kate, or ex-incest and spouse-abuse victim and current adulteress Jessica--but Madame Maria is afraid to look too closely into the too-alarming future to see the details of the impending doom. Pulitzer, however, is not afraid to look too closely into the ever so dramatic pasts of these tanned and trim chums who are being squeezed by the cruel social machinery of Exclusive, Rich, Powerful, Ultradesirable Palm Beach, Florida. Just a hint without giving away the powerful ending: Someone Will Die. O Tempora! O Mores! Au Bar! -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.