Love & Desire & Hate

This crisp, savvy romance by actress and novelist Collins ( Prime Time ) assembles a vivid array of international stage and film personalities in Acapulco in 1955, where one of them is murdered on a movie location. Tracing the lives of each, Collins returns to Paris in 1943 where Ines Dessault, age 14, plies her hooker's trade in order to survive in occupied France. Brutalized by a client, let's not give away Joan's inimitable style!/mc fascist Italian general Umberto Scrofo, she stabs him with his razor, leaving him for dead. Ines flees to England, educating and upgrading herself to ``courtesan.'' Scrofo recovers, kills a woman in Greece and earns the sworn hatred of Nikolas Stanopolis--future film director Nicholas Stone. Meanwhile Ines and Julian (``Looks'') Brooks, top British box office star, fall in love. Ines worries about her secret past and contends with rivals--Julian's blowsy wife Phoebe and precocious teenage dancer Dominique, whose eerie, sexually frustrated duenna Agathe also pines for Julian. With all the principal players gathered in Mexico, the plot takes many an engaging turn, especially when the vile Scrofo surfaces as a moneyed producer. Collins dishes up a tasty read, pleasingly seasoned with tattle and memorabilia of stage and screen. (Mar.)