Those Wicked Pleasures

Endowed with pots of old money and a taste for kinky sex, Lara Stanton is the star of this gilt-edged peepshow of a tale. Lara's sensual nature is awakened when she discovers a cousin sporting with a pair of nubile young women. She soon enjoys her first sexual encounter with Sam Fayne, the adoring boy next door who has impeccable social standing and is also a nice guy. For a time, Lara becomes secretly obsessed with Jamal Ben El-Raisuli, a wealthy Moroccan philanderer, even though their exploitative and exotic sexual encounters erode her self-esteem. Thus Lara, continent-hopping on her private jet, scampers through life (including a couple of marriages and divorces) looking for a husband who falls between these extremes: one who is kind, monogamous and mildly depraved. Latow ( Three Rivers , which has sold more than 600,000 copies in paperback) says that characters are interesting instead of making them so. Evan Valentine, one of Lara's lovers, has won a Nobel Prize, been knighted by the queen of England and graced the cover of Time , but after Lara gives his privates a workout, the best line he can manage is ``This is the first day of the rest of my life.'' (July)