British novelist-screenwriter Bagshawe (The Go-To Girl
) updates '70s mega-business romance Scruples
with this internationally flavored fantasia on love, lies and shopping. After 13 years of marriage, jewelry magnate Pierre Massot suddenly disappears from his British-born wife Sophie's life. For seven more years, Sophie (née Roberts) stays in Paris raising son Tom and cowering before mother-in-law Katherine until, with her priest's blessing, she has Pierre declared legally dead and starts showing interest in the family business. Naïvely, she allows herself to be taken in personally and professionally by the new CEO, Gregoire Lazard, and finds herself fooled by the grasping overdressed Oklahoma-born PR executive, Judy Dean, who was Pierre's lover until he disappeared. Gradually, Sophie masters retail, the family and even loves again, but not without a lot of hard knocks. Jewels and couture (Sophie's a clothes horse) are described in more detail than the sex, while murder and betrayal in Mother Russia give this story of the rich and glamorous its dark side. But House of Massot shenanigans and the mystery of Pierre's disappearance don't put much rock beneath the glitter. (Apr.
)
