Seducing Ingrid Bergman

Slipstreaming behind The Paris Wife and any number of other fact-based love stories that use the City of Light as a backdrop, this middling novel from Greenhalgh (Coco Igor) centers on the real-life love affair between combat photographer Robert Capa and Hollywood movie star Ingrid Bergman at the end of WWII. He's with his good friend, writer Irwin Shaw, and she's about to start a USO tour of Europe. After meeting at the Ritz Hotel, the two fall helplessly in love. The romance is not without tension, since Bergman is married and Capa is not used to commitment. The affair continues after Bergman returns to Hollywood to film Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious, but can it survive Capa's growing dissipation and Bergman's mounting guilt? The author dutifully fills in Capa's past to explain his Gypsy-like existence and Ingrid's unhappy domestic life with a controlling husband to show her need for real love. In the end, Greenhalgh doesn't find anything convincingly truthful in this true story. Agent: Caroline Davidson, Caroline Davidson Literary Agency. (Mar.)