Twenty-two-year-old pop star Cherry Pye is attempting a comeback from her latest drug and alcohol disaster. Ann DeLusia is Cherry's 'undercover stunt double,' portraying Cherry whenever the singer is too wasted to go out in public. But, one night, Ann-as-Cherry is mistakenly kidnapped from a South Beach hotel by an obsessed paparazzo named Bang Abbott. Now the challenge for Cherry's handlers (über-stage mother; horndog record producer; nipped-and-tucked twin publicists; weed-whacker-wielding bodyguard) is to rescue Ann while keeping her existence secret from the public - and from Cherry herself.
A further complication: Ann has had a bewitching encounter with Skink, the unhinged former governor of Florida, and now he's heading for Miami to find her.
Will Bang achieve his fantasy of a private photo session with Cherry? Will Cherry sober up in time to lip-synch her concert tour? Will Skink track down Ann before Cherry's posse does?
All will be revealed in Carl Hiaasen's hilarious spin on life in the celebrity fast lane.
Hemingway Cutthroat by Michael Atkinson
Set in civil war–torn Spain in 1937, Atkinson's solid sequel to 2009's Hemingway Deadlights finds the celebrated author feeling like a fraud, a three-dollar bill, a charlatan everyone treated like a messiah. With the occasional help of fellow writer John Dos Passos, Hemingway looks into the execution of José Robles, a medical volunteer and accused Marxist spy, with whom he was acquainted years earlier in Italy, after Robles's body lies in the hills outside Valencia for more than three weeks before it's discovered. Hemingway's base in Madrid, the hectic Hotel Florida, sees the likes of Errol Flynn, Eric Blair (aka George Orwell), various prostitutes, and annoying socialite Mordaunt Worsleighson, who becomes Hemingway's unwelcome assistant through much of his determined search for Robles's killers. Plenty of sex and violence help move the action along, but the underlying reasons for Hemingway's obsessive quest never become fully clear.
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