Passion's Shadow

Conn, a screenwriter best known for the lesbian-themed film Claire of the Moon (which she later adapted into her first novel), explores a lesbian love triangle in which a mother and daughter fall in love with the same woman. Unfortunately, with its slick melodrama and vapidly developed themes, this book also reads like a novelized version of a screenplay. Lindsay Brennan, a successful if workaholic architect who divides her time between Seattle and Portland, develops a sexual relationship with Sondra Pinchot, an attractive middle-aged interior designer who, until meeting Lindsay, had been heterosexual. After the women become partners on an important, lucrative architectural/design project, Sondra's uncontrollable alcoholism grows evident, and the affair dissolves. When Samantha, Sondra's married daughter, who is also an interior designer, sends her mother to an alcoholic treatment center and assumes her workload on the project, a much more intense love relationship evolves between Lindsay and Samantha. Both mother and daughter, upon learning of the other's affair with Lindsay, must deal with their alarm; the real conflict, however, is Lindsay's workaholism, which threatens to destroy her relationship with Samantha. Throughout, Conn emphasizes the ways and language of various Twelve Step programs, and readers not attuned to these may bristle at the emphasis. But in any case, despite the ``incestuous'' overtones to the love triangle, this tale is really just a routine, if chic, romantic potboiler. Author tour. (Oct.)