Facade

The author of The Prize Pulitzer loads this potboiler with lurid, predictable stories of sex, money and nasty secrets. Sometime in the 1980s four young women with plenty to conceal meet by chance in Palm Beach and spend the rest of the decade in an unholy alliance. Unbridled ambition leads Kate Robinson to manipulate, lie and steal her way from working as a tabloid reporter to writing bestselling books; the well-born Sarah Potter, disinherited after a deadly, cocaine-induced episode of hit-and-run, thirsts for money and uses sex to get it; respectably married Christine Wells hides her past as a London prostitute by striking a sex-for-silence deal with a local entrepreneur; and Jessie Malcolm finds happiness with a married man until her history of childhood sexual abuse takes an overwhelming toll. Despite their obvious needs for privacy, the fatal four become clients of a Hungarian psychic who foresees betrayal and death, the cornerstones of the altogether contrived ending to this heavy-handed exercise. Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club alternates; author tour. (June)