Under the Boardwalk

May 3, 2004
Ariana Costas, the heroine of Phillips's (The Heartbreaker,
etc.) featherweight confection, is a Jersey girl with a wacky family who quickly gets caught up in some potentially dangerous hijinks. Sound familiar? Despite the parallels, Ariana is no Stephanie Plum. Rather, she's a confused, repressed psychology professor who feels like a misfit in her family of eccentrics. But when she learns that her twin sister, Zoe, has gone missing, she reluctantly returns to her family home just outside of Atlantic City. Shortly thereafter, she's shot at and saved by gorgeous undercover police detective Quinn Donovan, who tells her, in no uncertain terms, that Zoe is fine and that she should hightail it out of town for her sister's safety and her own. Instead, Ariana decides to don Zoe's miniskirt and do some sleuthing at the casino where Zoe worked. When Ariana isn't poking around the casino or heating up the pages with Quinn, she's trying to talk some sense into her parents, a pair of lovable Addams family look-alikes who are plotting their next money-making scheme. Phillips's passive prose prevents her protagonists from growing beyond their prescribed roles, and her ham-handed humor contributes little to the story (Ariana's family owns a monkey named Spank, which naturally leads to exchanges like this one—Ariana: "Spank who?"; her mother: "Spank the monkey!"). Nevertheless, Phillips's tale is loaded with enough sexual pyrotechnics to light a fire under her fans. Agent, Robert Gottlieb at Trident Media
.

May 1, 2004
After five years in Vermont carving out a staid, sensible life as a college professor, Ariana Costas returns to her small Atlantic coastal hometown to discover why Zoe, her identical twin, has suddenly disappeared while working as a waitress in the casino owned by a suspected drug lord. From her first day back, when an unknown gunman mistakes Ari for Zoe and a charmingly cocky undercover officer named Quinn Donovan tackles her on the beach, Ariana's life suddenly becomes a whole lot more exciting, and she is forced to reevaluate long-held beliefs in light of new evidence. Family complications--the boisterous, fun-loving, scam-running clan has now expanded to include a capuchin monkey and an extremely insecure young teenage runaway--only add to the general mayhem. This fast-paced, flirty, and adventurous romance by " New York Times" best-selling author Phillips is her first hardcover and will be eagerly received by her legions of fans, who will then clamor for Zoe's story, scheduled for release in 2005.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2004, American Library Association.)