Malicious Intent

For his first foray into fiction, National Enquirer writer Walker, author (with Faye Resnick) of Nicole Brown Simpson: Private Diary of a Life Interrupted, dreams up an over-the-top, tabloid-style thriller littered with real-life Hollywood references and thinly veiled fantasy sequences featuring recognizable characters. Hit actress Charmain Burns, the bad-girl star of TV show BevHills High, wants to punish tabloid reporter Steve Bellini after he publishes unflattering pictures of her beating a horse, but her method of retribution accidentally causes his death. The ensuing investigation drags in fashion designers, drug smugglers, a stalker called Randak 2000, who thinks he's from outer space, power brokers, CIA agents and another tabloid reporter, Cameron Tull, who eventually pieces together the life story Charmain is desperate to keep secret. The actress has good reason to fear exposure: since the day she murdered her abusive mother at age 12, she has been a magnet for crime and violence. As she works her way up from beauty queen to Hollywood star, even her one true love interest, wealthy French Creole charmer Patrick Taulere, comes to a gory end. Seducing men and women alike and armed at all times with a pistol and a straight razor, Charmain almost always gets what she wants, but as her various pursuers close in on her after Bellini's death, her life--and, almost as important, her Hollywood career--hangs in the balance. She is about to be offered a lead role in a feature film, but dead bodies are piling up as fast as tabloid clippings, and a final macabre encounter with the otherworldly Randak 2000 seals her fate. The sleaze factor is high, the plot convoluted, but Walker knows his material (and his audience) as well as anyone. Literary Guild featured alternate. (Oct.)