Amanda

After racking up a total of 57 titles in paperback, Hooper (The Wizard of Seattle) makes her hardcover debut with yet another sexy, engaging-and overwrought-read. Jesse Daulton, multimillionaire patriarch of one of the South's oldest families, is dying. His fortune and fabled plantation house, Glory, will be shared by Kate, the unmarried daughter he ignores, and his two grandsons, surly Sullivan (Sully) Lattimore, who runs Glory's legendary stables, and his brother, Reece, who works quietly in the family business. But then a young woman shows up claiming to be Jesse's long-missing granddaughter, Amanda, who'd disappeared 20 years before, taken from Glory one stormy night by her desperate mother. While other would-be Amandas have stepped forward only to be discredited through the efforts of Walker McLellan, the Daultons' handsome family lawyer, Jesse is certain that this Amanda is genuine, and invites her to stay at Glory. Walker, too, comes under Amanda's spell, falling in love with her despite his conviction that she's an imposter. After Jesse changes his will to include Amanda, however, ominous accidents, one of them fatal, begin to occur. Only when Amanda finally remembers what happened the night she left Glory is a murderer exposed and her own suprising true identity revealed. Hooper isn't the smoothest of writers, but she knows how to serve up a latter-day gothic that will hold readers in its brooding grip. Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club alternate selections. (Nov.)