Bookends Lovely Me: the Life of Jacqueline Susann

What makes a medical journalist whose last book was Women and the Crisis in Sex Hormones (1977) spend six years writing a biography of Jacqueline Susann, author of the definitive '60s trash trinity, Valley of the Dolls, The Love Machine and Once Is Not Enough? Perhaps it was Susann's unique amalgam of poignancy and chutzpah. Her pores were too big to pass a screen test, she could not sing or dance, she was too short to be a model and, after 25 years of trying, she was nowhere as an actress. She drank heavily and was addicted to pills, and her autistic son had to be institutionalized. When cancer struck, she made a pact with God: "If He would give her twelve more years to prove herself the best-selling authoress in the world, she would settle for that."

Susann was not the settling kind. She indeed got a dozen-year reprieve, and her books rose to the top of the charts. But she threw a drink at Johnny Carson, slapped a critic after he had panned one of her works, slept with an entire Borscht Belt of comedians and had lesbian relationships with a number of celebrities. All this has proved irresistible to Seaman, who takes Susann seriously, complete with index, bibliography and detailed footnotes. Lovely Me ^ contains more than 200 interviews and countless inside stories. All it lacks is the salty humor and gutsy immediacy its subject was famous for.

OUTBREAK

by Robin Cook

Putnam; 366 pages; $17.95

Dr. Marissa Blumenthal, public health officer at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, finds herself caught between micro and macro killers in Robin Cook's newest medical tingler. She must solve two mysteries: how an outbreak of Ebola hemorrhagic fever (mortality rate more than 90%) got from Central Africa to the U.S., and why it only strikes staff and patients at clinics with prepaid health-care plans. Physician-Novelist Cook enjoys stretching credulity (in his previous blockbuster Coma, people were murdered to provide organs for the transplant trade). Here a league of conservative doctors plays with the viral equivalent of nuclear weapons in order to preserve its market share. The petit Dr. Blumenthal discovers the Hippocratic hypocrisy only after she is turned into a composite of Nancy Drew and Wonder Woman, crisscrossing the country to study and contain flare-ups of EHF. Cook's best-selling technique is infallible: he lowers his readers' resistance with hard science, then exposes them to the woman-in-jeopardy scenes and chase sequences that spread his infectious tale to the moviegoing population.

MURDER TAKES A PARTNER

by Haughton Murphy

Simon & Schuster; 221 pages; $15.95

Not many tears are shed when Clifton Holt, artistic director of the National Ballet Company, is stabbed to death by a drug addict. His dancers had regarded him as a martinet, and his board of directors as a threat to their social ambitions. But what appears to be one more senseless Manhattan murder takes an abrupt turn when the killer is himself killed in prison after bragging that he was paid $24,000 for the Holt job. "Damn," says Reuben Frost, "will all this be in the papers?" Not a chance. For Frost, retired Wall Street lawyer and the dance company's board chairman, is also friends with N.Y.P.D. Detective Luis Bautista, who promises to "keep the lid on" until the case is solved. The pair met in Haughton Murphy's first novel, Murder for Lunch. In their second encounter, the Princeton-educated attorney and the Puerto Rican- born cop blend culture and crime as expertly as the bartender at Frost's private club mixes martinis.

COMMUNION

by Whitley Strieber

Morrow; 299 pages; $17.95

! They're here. Creatures from Out There, UFOs are invading the nation's bookstores. Moreover, these accounts of aliens are not sci-fi; they are on nonfiction shelves, and one has even climbed up the best-seller list. In 1985, according to Novelist Whitley Strieber (The Wolfen), small creatures with "fierce, limitless eyes" abducted him from his cottage in upstate New York and subjected him to painful prods and probes. Through hypnosis, Strieber later recalled more than a dozen similar occurrences. Credibility is dissipated when he remembers "being terrified as a little boy by an appearance of Mr. Peanut" and evaporates when he speaks of tarot cards and the riddle of the sphinx. Strieber lobbies for understanding between humans and aliens: "two universes spinning each other together . . . the old weaver of reality rethreading creation's loom." The last time anyone dispensed such advice was on The Twilight Zone, where it belonged.