GENEVIEVE

Bestseller Dickey (Drive Me Crazy ) offers more sex-drenched melodrama with an instantly engrossing story about a couple whose marriage is tested by secrets both familial and sexual. Beautiful, independent "financial guru" Genevieve Forbes (née LaKeisha Shauna Smith) and her husband, a medical research scientist (and the novel's unnamed narrator), are by-products of broken families. Genevieve ran away after suffering intolerable abuse by her murderous father and cruel grandmother, and the husband's rural Texas childhood was marred by his mother's death and a virtually absent, errant father. The death of Genevieve's grandmother Willie Esther forces both to return to her backwoods Alabama hometown for a reunion that stirs up old grudges, reopens still-painful wounds and sparks reckless familial infighting. While the narrator finds himself mildly amused by Genevieve's aging, folksy relatives, he's immediately salivating over Genevieve's hootchy-cootchy sister, Kenya. Their red-hot affair shifts into high gear just as Kenya's roughneck fiancé, Deuce, pays them a surprise visit and more secrets about Genevieve's childhood leak. Dickey creates a smidgen of suspense around the survival of the couple's marriage and the revelation of various secrets, but that's hardly his main goal. What the novel lacks in plot it makes up for in explicit sex and hot-tempered fireworks. Agent, Sara Camilli . (May)