Second Love - Softcover

Judith Gould is the New York Times bestselling author of  The Best Is Yet to Come, A Moment in Time, Time to Say Good-bye, Rhapsody, Till the End of Time, Second Love, and Too Damn Rich, among other titles. She lives in the historic Hudson River Valley and New York City.

Gould continues in the Sidney Sheldon tradition, this time with echoes of Windmills of the Gods: a widowed heroine, a hit- woman, and a group of ominously foreign bad guys. Dorothy-Anne Hale-Cantwell (from Love-Makers, not reviewed) is a 31-year-old billionairess who owns and oversees the Hale hotel and travel empire--with hypersumptuous hotels all over the world and a fantasy island being built south of Puerto Rico. Dorothy-Anne is so rich, thin, gorgeous, and successful that, perhaps to win the sympathies of readers, Gould makes her a really nice person to boot--and visits upon her the sufferings of a female Job. The story begins with this heroine losing her husband in a plane crash, her baby through a miscarriage, and her entire set of reproductive organs to cancer. Meanwhile, a coven of Asian gangsters (Honorable Ox, Honorable Rooster, Honorable Dragon, et al.) schemes to take over her business in order to launder their drug money. And so, to sabotage her, they plant Legionnaires' disease in one Hale hotel and salmonella bacteria in another. Having damaged the sources of Dorothy-Anne's income, they plan to call in her outstanding loans, which they've purchased, and commandeer her empire. Help comes from: her own smarts; the support of her extended family, including three children; p.r. chief and best friend Venetia; and new, eponymous ``second love,'' none other than Mr. Huntington Netherland Winslow III, a movie-star handsome, fabulously wealthy California state senator. One complication, though, is Hunt's alcoholic wife, who takes up with a sexy con-man and plans to kill off both her hubby and his domineering mother. Gould's fourth hardcover (Too Damn Rich, 1992, etc.) is one of her sillier offerings, with lots of explicit sex mixing pain with pleasure, and orgasms with visions of flower gardens, like clich‚s in ecstasy. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.