DANGEROUS KISS

The fifth in a series featuring sexy Lucky Santangelo (Vendetta, 1997, etc.), the feminist, gun-toting head of Panther Studios. Lucky is a survivor, and she’s had a lot to survive. She was only five when she discovered her mother dead in a swimming pool, murdered by her nemesis, the Bonnatti family. And then Lucky’s third husband and soulmate, the handsome Hollywood director Lennie Golden, was kidnaped and manacled for six months in a cave in Sicily, rescued from same by the young and lovely Claudia, with whom he had a one-day stand. Lennie had been married previously to the daughter of Lucky’s second husband, the Greek shipping magnate Dmitri Stanislopoulos, and Lucky’s former step-granddaughter Brigette Stanislopoulos, a “top supermodel,” has also had plenty of death and sexual perversion to survive, though she hasn’t done it as well as Lucky. When we join up with everyone now, Lucky is 40 but still the smartest, most beautiful woman in Hollywood, and Lennie is directing a film starring Mary Lou, the wife of Lucky’s black half-brother Steven—until, on the way from the studio, Mary Lou is murdered in a carjacking. Brigette, meanwhile, is raped and turned into a heroin addict by her vicious Italian husband Carlo, who hopes to steal her inheritance (from her grandfather, the shipping magnate). And Claudia shows up from Sicily with Lennie’s illegitimate son, the product of that one-day stand. In the end, Lucky threatens Carlo with castration, shoots a psychopath threatening Lennie, and agrees to raise Lennie’s Sicilian son. If you like Collins, this one’s a hoot. Well, even if you don—t. (Literary Guild Main selection; Doubleday Book Club Main selection; TV and radio satellite tour; author tour)