In this just-miss he-said/she-said from Candela (Life Over Easy
), Evelyn Morgan Reed-Sinclair is a reluctant socialite returning to San Francisco a hundred pounds lighter after a year in Paris—and a hundred times more worldly after discovering her art teacher/lover was a married man. Accompanying her gay best friend, James, to his Web job one day, Evelyn is mistaken for a temp and decides to move from rich dilettante to working girl. Meanwhile, Alexander Velazquez, a wunderkind lawyer from a working-class Bay Area family, gets fired from his high-priced Manhattan firm (after suggesting that the cleaning staff unionize) and comes home to San Francisco as well, taking a high-powered but icky job for the money. Evelyn and Alex work in adjacent office buildings—and readers can guess the rest. Their story, told in a wry first-person by the two, alternately has some nice almost-encounters and internal ditherings, but they're overly drawn out. Overwritten secondaries tip the scales. (Aug.)
