After 26 bestsellers, Jayne Ann Krentz has the romance formula down pat. Beautiful strong-willed heroine—in this case, fund manager Elizabeth Cabot—meets dashing, powerful hero, here CEO Jack Fairfax. They bicker, they banter, they fall madly in love.
puts the pair on the trail of a killer. As they track their prime suspect to a low-budget film noir festival, the lovers parry femmes fatales, two-bit thugs and mysterious callers who would do their screen counter-parts proud. Yes, the ending is flat and pat, but Krentz has so much fun sending up the noir genre that you won't mind going along for the ride. (Putnam, $23.95)
Bottom Line: No Big Sleep, but no snoozer either
by Dave Eggers
Book of the Week
Like the title of his memoir, 29-year-old Dave Eggers can sound a bit too ironic. But beneath his smirk lies a heartrending tale: When Eggers is a senior in college, both his parents die of cancer. Suddenly responsible for his 8-year-old brother, the aspiring writer sets off for Berkeley, where he juggles parental responsibilities with his own appetites for fame and romance. Enraged and energized by the tragedy in his life, Eggers starts an underground zine and schemes to get on MTV's The Real World. Through it all, he manipulates people with gleeful abandon. "I am allowed," he declares. "I am owed."
Though Eggers's bag of tricks—he provides his own guide to the book's metaphors—can seem a tad too self-conscious, he can also be scathingly perceptive and hysterically funny. By the time he returns to Chicago to confront his troubled past, Eggers takes off his clown mask and reveals a true, and truly broken, heart. (Simon & Schuster, $23)
Bottom Line: Almost lives up to the title
A Memoir of The Sound of Music
by Charmian Carr with Jean A.S. Strauss
Baby boomers who still tear up at "Sixteen Going on Seventeen" will probably be shocked to learn that Charmian Carr—who performed that song as Liesl von Trapp in 1965's The Sound of Music—is now a grandmother and interior decorator pushing 60. But that's about the only rude awakening in Carr's PG-rated look back at the making of the Rodgers and Hammerstein movie classic. Rest assured, fans, the hills of Austria were hardly alive with the sound of the cast squabbling. And for Carr, a 21-year-old physician's assistant when she was plucked for her first (and only) major movie role, playing Liesl seems to have been the high point of her life. The only sour notes are sounded by Christopher Plummer, who dissed the song "Edelweiss" as "schmaltzy" and was chilly toward all the kids but Carr (but he denies ever calling the film "the sound of mucus" as rumored). When Plummer flirted shamelessly with his onscreen daughter—and plied Carr with champagne in a Salzburg bar—well, those were a few of her favorite things. (Viking, $23.95)
Bottom Line: Sweetly sentimental
>STICKIN' James Carville Insulted that some people regard fealty as "weakness of mind or character," the political strategist and diehard Clinton apologist argues The Case for Loyalty, the subtitle of his new book. (Simon & Schuster, $18)
TEST PATTERN Marjorie Klein The year is 1954, and the television is black-and-white. In a fable worthy of The Twilight Zone, young Cassie Palmer is able to see snippets of the future in her family's new Magnavox. (Morrow, $25)
A SLOW BURNING Stanley Pottinger Using his background in civil rights work at the Justice Department, the Fourth Procedure author fashions a thriller with characters motivated by racism. (Dutton, $24.95)
>Cokie and Steve Roberts
After 33 years of marriage, journalists Cokie and Steve Roberts are the kind of couple who can—and often do—complete each other's sentences. But while writing their new book, From This Day Forward, a he-said-she-said dialogue about their marital trials and triumphs, they tried to think and write separately. It wasn't easy. "Habit is a powerful thing," says Cokie, 56, coanchor of ABC's This Week with Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts and a news analyst for National Public Radio. "But I'm not saying our marriage is just a habit." The Robertses decided to explore their union after a 1997 newspaper article they wrote about the wedding of their daughter Rebecca, 29, generated hundreds of letters. "There's a real hunger out there," says Steve, 56, a journalism professor at the George Washington University and former New York Times reporter. "People want to know that they can grow together in a marriage."
The couple believe that devotion and compromise are key, especially when all is not wedded bliss. With Steve employed in New York City, Cokie gave up her job as a Washington, D.C., television anchor and producer soon after their marriage in order to be with him and, eventually, to raise the couple's two children (son Lee is 31). But she got so depressed that she stopped getting dressed in the morning. Now her public profile has elevated her as a role model for young women. These days the couple, who live in Bethesda, Md., reserve Sundays for family dinners and spend lots of time tending their backyard tomato patch. Growth takes a lot of nurturing.
- Contributors:
- Cynthia Sanz,
- Peter Ames Carlin,
- Victoria Balfour,
- Rochelle Jones.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
