Coyote

Michele Marie Azzi, the 24-year-old narrator of this tale of frustrated love, is a Los Angeles soap-opera star who can't get over her affair four years earlier (when she was a student in New York) with one of her film professors, David Hellerman, whom she calls Coyote, from a Joni Mitchell song. These days she lives with a man she doesn't care for, and her life is a dreary, self-destructive routine (""What I regretted most was the loss of love''). In a series of flashbacks, she remembers the good and bad times with Coyote (he called her ``Shrimpton'' after the actress), who was married and had two children from whom he couldn't yet part. Along the way, we meet Shrimpton's father, a mean, domineering man whose personality explains much of his daughter's numbness, and Katie, Shrimpton's older friend who presents a pleasantly cynical but loving contrast to Shrimpton's father. By the end of the novel, Shrimpton returns to Manhattan to search for Coyotenot knowing if she will ever see him again. Vannucci writes an appealing, fast-paced story. (August)