cover image Silk

Silk

Robert Mackintosh, R. Macintosh. Pinnacle Books, $4.99 (0pp) ISBN 978-1-55817-579-2

In his first novel, Mackintosh, a Broadway costume designer, demonstrates an ability to devise entertaining characters and conflicts but throws them away on a plodding story filled with workaday accounts of clothing manufacture. Dany Mounet, a poor but talented seamstress in 1930s Paris, is taken under the wing of rich, fashionable and discreetly promiscuous Charlotte Dessaux and her husband Gerard, a theatrical producer. When one of Gerard's Paris productions moves to New York, Dany, recently widowed and pregnant (with Gerard's child), comes over to make the costumes. Staying on in the U.S., Dany builds a thriving business and raises her daughter Veronique. Back in Europe, when Charlotte dies after bearing a son, Gerard is charged with murdering her; acquitted in the trial, he commits suicide, leaving the boy to be raised by relatives in England. Years later, Veronique, who does not know her father's true identity, falls hard for David Wilfrid, an English playwright in the States for a production of a work based on the lives of his parents, Dany's old friends Charlotte and Gerard Dessaux. (Jan.)