cover image Hot Shot

Hot Shot

Susan Elizabeth Phillips. Pocket Books, $7.99 (496pp) ISBN 978-0-671-65831-1

Phillips ( Fancy Pants ) recovers from a sluggish start to offer a fun and lively look at lots of `tales' already love, microchips and rock 'n' roll. In 1976, California socialite Susannah Faulconer is engaged to marry an up-and-coming executive in her father's technology corporation when Sam Gamble hustles his way into Susannah's well-ordered life with a revolutionary product: a prototype for a microcomputer, the work of electronics maven Yank Yankowski. Sam, a long-hairedp. 42 visionary, captures Susannah's imagination, and when he crashes her picture-perfect garden wedding, she hikes up her gown and hops onto the back of his Harley. Her euphoria is short-lived as she realizes that neither Yank nor Sam has the requisite business sense to succeed in pk their venture. She digs in, making the most of her upper-crust training and a few library books on business, but it's clear they need a professional. The unlikely entrepreneurs pique the interest of marketing wizard Mitchell Blaine. Mitch sees Susannah as Sam's ``woman trouble'' but when he tries to cut her out of the company, he learns that under the ex-debutante facade is a woman who can play hardball with the boys. (June)