The Dead Hollywood Moms Society

A gleeful spin--packed with laugh-aloud zingers--through the family lives of filmdom's rich and famous yields a lively launch to a projected series. With her stable, 12-year-old marriage and a nine-year-old daughter, animator Lucy Freers is used to being perceived as something like the head of the local chapter of the Brady Bunch by her Hollywood neighbors. But she no longer has an exclusive on family values when the glamour set decides that motherhood is the biggest thing since Perrier and liposuction. When even Julia Prentice, the piranha-celeb who lives next door, adopts a baby (with coverage on Entertainment Tonight), Lucy notes that the parenthood cult is full-blown. But then Julia, the wife of one of the country's best-loved actors, is found dead in the Freerses' swimming pool. Lucy and her husband become suspects in the high-profile murder case, and Lucy realizes that she will have to clear her name on her own--especially since it turns out that her husband had been one of Julia's romantic targets. Lucy reels from discovery to discovery, as there's been, for example, a lot of duplicity and some S&M among her acquaintances. Luckily, when things look tough, there's always the earthy detective Teresa Shoe to pull her back to reality. Maracotta, a movie-biz veteran and author of Everything We Wanted, makes Lucy a savvy, amiable narrator who finds out more about Hollywood's real private lives than she may have wanted to know. (Sept.)