A conniving character given to getting into steamy situations on the daytime soap All My Children
, the fictional Kendall Hart is here given a novelist's voice, and the ghostwriter (or writers) who produced this sticky tie-in get it right. The novel's conceit is that the book is Kendall Hart's roman à clef, written to set All My Children
's town of Pine Valley on its ear. Kendall Hart's stand-in for this fiction (i.e., the fictional author Kendall's fictional avatar in the novel) is a sweet yet assertive young woman, Avery Wilkins, who runs her own New York–based cosmetics company, Flair, and is launching a new perfume—Charm!—that she hopes will put her on the map. When Avery first founded the company with financial backer Finn Adams, a softhearted smart man she later fell in love with, she never thought that he would die and leave his share of the company to his Paris Hilton–type daughter, Parker. Parker's drug and alcohol binging at late-night glitterati parties endanger the reputation of Flair and its new perfume, and a mysterious phone call to Avery from a manipulative woman claiming to be Avery's mother (a nod to Susan Lucci's character, Erica Kane) throws everything into a heady cloud of smoke. Romance aficionados will find Avery's two love affairs (with a dashing newsmagazine producer and a quick-witted yet sensitive billionaire, natch) intoxicating, but the denouement lacks punch—perhaps because soaps never have to come up with an ending. (Feb.)
