Wherever there's money and glamour, trouble can't be too far behind. In
"Hollywood Kids" Jackie Collins takes her readers back to the Hollywood
Hills for another absorbing page-turner of sex, ambition, and deadly
revenge.
At the novel's core is the Hollywood Five, a clique of jaded
twenty-somethings whose parents (all major players) thought that
child-rearing ended with naming their offspring after themselves.
Jordanna Levitt is the wildly beautiful daughter of a powerful producer
and legendary movie star mother. Even though she flaunts a coltish
bad-girl image, Jordanna yearns for more than lounging behind the velvet
ropes in chi-chi clubs and existing on a diet of Midnight Cowboys.
Jordanna's best friend, Cheryl Landers, is a sassy, leggy redhead, who
is equally idle. Cheryl fills her days doing lunch and buying up Rodeo
Drive until a Hollywood Madam asks her to mind shop while she's out of
town. Pandering to the rich and famous goes so smoothly that she can't
resist turning a trick herself. Grant Lennon, Jr., the son of the last
generation's wildly handsome icon, is a junior agent at International
Artists Agents. Not satisfied with the number of starlets he can get on
his own, he agrees to "test-run" women for Cheryl's fledgling
entrepreneurial venture for a fee. Marjory Sanderson is a dreamy-eyed
head case. Barely recovered from anorexia, she invents one phobia fast
on the heels of the last one in order to keep her television magnate
father's attention. Shep Worth, the effeminately beautiful son of a
sex-symbol mother, who won't publicly acknowledge her age, is a man who
won't publicly acknowledge his alternative sexual preference.
"The group had grown up together, sharing the experience of too much too
soon", Collins writes. When you've got your family's great looks, and
you're always driving next year's hottest sportscar, and work isn't
necessary because you've got a wallet filled with the sky's-the-limit
credit cards-- why fight it?
These Hollywood kids have been given everything money can buy except a
raison d'ecirctre. Though their attitudes are large enough to fill any
room, these offspring of privilege are all desperately trying to figure
out what to do with themselves. However, life among the rich means life
among the damned. A recently released psycho-killer, erotically
propelled by blood-lust, is determined to wreak havoc and revenge on the
kids' lives.
Interwoven into this central drama are the strong stories of a
supporting cast of characters: Michael Scorsinni, the street-smart
ex-NYPD detective who is doomed to traverse the country until he finds
his kidnapped daughter; Bobby Rush, the ambitious and talented
actor/producer, who only has his Hollywood Royalty lineage working
against him; Kennedy Chase, the blonde and brilliant young widow and
journalist who puts the pieces together before the cops and felicitously
learns in the process that she's still capable of falling in love; Luca
Carlotti, the dandy mob kingpin with the cobra's smile and a weakness
for classy call-girls; and finally there's Charlie Dollar, the stoned
movie-star savant, perpetually on the prowl for women to fulfill his
fantasy of a polygamous idyll.
Not since best-selling superstar Jackie Collins created "Hollywood
Wives", the book which established a whole new standard for novels of
the American dream in the extreme, has she dealt so incisively and so
revealingly with tinseltown, and with the people who live and die there.
Jackie Collins is back doing what she does best, chronicling the lives
of the rich, famous and infamous with devastating accuracy. "Hollywood
Kids" is Jackie Collins at her suspenseful roller coaster ride best.
