White Chocolate

An ambitious biracial television reporter takes on a white-supremacist group in this thoughtless thriller set in Detroit. Pale-skinned, blonde reporter Taylor James uses her looks to infiltrate a white-supremacist group and break an important investigative story, but her darker-skinned colleagues resent her success and publicly question her ""blackness."" Her struggle for respect is compounded by her reluctant engagement to Philip Carter, the greedy, cynical owner of the network that employs her. When her first love comes to work at the same station, Taylor must choose between love and her career. A paradoxical character, Taylor insists that she is not sleeping her way to the top--and does just that, with a shallowness surprising even in a novel that tends to describe minor characters by hairstyle. The threat Taylor faces from the white supremacists is believable enough, but in the end it is impossible to care much about her or about this failed attempt to dramatize the difficulties facing people of mixed race. (May)