"A carefully-reasoned, brutal takedown, a hatchet job among hatchet jobs." Zoë Heller gives it to "lordly" Salman Rushdie.
The mastermind of Brain Pickings: Maria Popova.
James Bond meets Nora Ephron. Look for my new one later this month: THE CHANEL CAPER
Here's the blurb:
Blake Weston is a smart, savvy, no BS, 56-year-old. Her DH, Ralph Marino, is a très James Bond ex-cop & head of security for a large international corporation. At a tense time in their relationship, Blake & Ralph are forced to work together to solve a murder in Shanghai & break up an international piracy ring.
As the book opens, Ralph is about to hit the Big Six O and he's not happy about it. Not that Blake is exactly thrilled about the prospect, either. Especially now that she suspects Ralph might be cheating on her with Melanie Bradshaw, a flak-jacket-wearing, gung ho war zone correspondent with a humungo pair of 36 Double D's. Blake and Ralph survived (barely) the seven year itch but why didn’t anyone warn her about the twenty-seven year itch?
The action starts when Blake buys a faux Chanel bag on a NYC sidewalk & escalates from there to an encounter with a fearsome Afghan war lord and a beautiful woman in Shanghai who might—or might not—be deadly. Other characters include an über-neurotic billionaire, a Martha Stewart clone trying to revive her career with the help of a red balconette bra, a rat-fink bastard named Clay Riggins, and Blake's best friend, Julia (twice divorced, once widowed), who has just switched from hetero to homo & made a commitment to Pilates and Mindful Living.
The Chanel Caper, a romcom mystery, is about the ups and downs of long-term relationships and addresses two of the most important questions of our time: 1) Is there sex after marriage? 2) Is sixty the new forty?