American Icon

Booth's latest novel (after Marry Me), the saga of a Martha Stewart-like lifestyle guru's tempestuous life, is a for-fans-only effort. In 1970, 20-year-old Kate Haywood, who has ""Nordic features chiseled like the ice floes and fjords in which her Viking ancestors had sailed,"" is a waitress at center-of-everything-hip Max's Kansas City in Manhattan. There, she meets her future husband, literary agent Peter Haywood, who soon turns her good design/fashion/cooking sense into an empire from which the egomaniacal Kate later excludes him. Driven away by Kate's tantrums, Peter leaves her and their daughter, Sam, for her scheming assistant Ruth, knocking Kate into a depression that nearly destroys her business network. Running parallel to this story line is the doomed marriage of Steve (an artist) and Donna (a surgeon), who split when Steve blames Donna for their young son's accidental death. After Kate has rebounded from her own divorce and saved her business, she and the proud but sensitive Steve fall in love in East Hampton. But is her company safe from the backstabbing Ruth? Is Peter gone forever? Booth's melodrama spins merrily on, but the cliche-ridden prose keeps it strictly humdrum. Set in a world where sexually aroused men's voices are ""husky,"" efficient business women look ""cucumber cool"" and a choice at a forked road will ""change her life forever,"" this uninspired romance fiction lacks panache. (Feb.)