Danger Zones

"Danger Zones is compulsively readable and utterly engrossing--one of those books which hooks you from page one until you reluctantly surrender it in the small hours of Saturday morning."--The Times (London)The danger zones--where sex, secrets, and sin collide--are the places that New York Times bestselling author Sally Beauman knows best . . . and explores with gripping, brilliant intensity in her new novel. In the picture-perfect English Cotswolds, two teenage girls dressed in punk finery attend a wild midnight party. Music, drugs, and dancing are promised by the enigmatic young man known only as Star. Charismatic and cunning, a conjurer who procures heaven for a price, Star sells seduction for a living. Now he's got a pill--a White Dove--that delivers the ultimate high. And he has a plan. By dawn, one girl will be dead, the other will have vanished--swept by Star into the danger zone.At the heart of that perilous place stands the gifted and reclusive Maria Cazarès, a couturier of originality and passion, a woman who shuns her own fame, a legend shrouded in mystery. Around her swirls rumor and counterrumor, whispers of shocking secrets and taboos broken. Fiercely shielded from celebrity's glare by Jean Lazare, her iron-willed partner--some say lover--Cazarès is surrounded only by a carefully selected few.And the most dangerous among them is Star.Now, as the glitterati assemble in Paris for the new collections, a fatal triangle established three decades before in sultry New Orleans is about to fulfill its tragic destiny. Two journalists, firebrand editor Rowland McGuire and investigative reporter Gini Hunter, pick up the heady scent of an unfolding scandal. And as they clash over how to cover it, their hostility ignites a sudden desperate flame of desire--a desire that, if quenched, will tilt their universe.Against the pounding beat and dazzling colors on the runway as the world waits breathless for the new Cazarès collection, the search for a missing innocent will reach its pulsingly suspenseful climax. At last, blood red truths will be revealed . . . as the author of Destiny sweeps us into the Danger Zones, where no heart is safe.From the Hardcover edition.