Soapsuds Book

Having escaped to Hollywood after catching her boyfriend in bed with her best friend, London stage actress Kate McPhee is offered a gig on the popular daytime television series Live for Tomorrow. As Devon Merrick - police detective, car crash victim, and love interest for at least two men - she knows all the secrets and sins pulsating in fictional Hope Canyon. But the real drama is off the set, where the soap is indeed slippery.

Enter Meredith Contini, the show’s power-wielding diva. Meredith has two rules: Know your place and Stay in it. Kate broke both on day one, which is why she suddenly found her character switching sexual orientation. That brilliant solution came from Daphne del Valle, the show’s barking-mad obsessive/compulsive producer, who drives herself and her actors to enthrall the audience. (“Sell the hurt. Sell the rage. Sell the hunger. Sell the loooooove.”)

As gay detective Devon Merrick, Kate is a smash. The show is a hit. But Kate’s private life seems to be becoming something of a drama itself. Especially since everybody thinks she really is gay, which is a problem since she thinks the best cure for her real-life broken heart is to get a man into her bed. But who? Kirk, her sexy, tan, and talented leading man, is involved with Meredith. There’s Matt, the magician who makes her tea, but will her fourteen-hour days keep them from the promise of tangled sheets? And there’s Wyatt, her handsome new co-star, who Kate believes is the great love of her life. Except that he’s married, and his wife, Christine, is Kate’s new makeup artist and the one sane friend she has made in Los Angeles.

As the line between television and reality blurs with increasing speed, tension tightens and passions surge. Does Wyatt want Kate as much as she wants him? Will Christine find out? Will Kate lose her new friend? Will Meredith finally have Kate fired? Will Kate ever get to “come out” as heterosexual on the set? Are her steamy kiss scenes fated to be only with beautiful women?

Emmy Award winning actress Finola Hughes whips up a frothy, scathingly funny novel worthy of any afternoon time slot in this delicious romp that takes readers through the twists, turns, and dish that drive the madness that is daytime television.

Publishers Weekly

When stage actress Kate McPhee quits London for L.A., leaving behind her cheating boyfriend and former best friend (yes, they were in bed together), she speedily lands a gig on the hit soap opera Live for Tomorrow, playing its beautiful, vampire-fighting lesbian cop, Det. Devon Merrick. Sounds like a cushy job-until she discovers the 20-hour shooting sessions, the bevy of perfect blondes making her life hell, the vapid but oh-so-gorgeous men, and her archenemy, the domineering matriarch of the show, Meredith Contini, who's a girlie-girl 60-something still trying to play 35. Determined to succeed, Kate sucks it up and makes the most of the sunshine and the sexy-but-dumb men passing her way, but as her popularity grows, Meredith grows more and more jealous, and Kate's life starts looking more and more like a soap opera itself. Readers will enjoy this spicy, sly behind-the-scenes look at the soap opera world-Hughes won an Emmy for her work on General Hospital and her bio somewhat resembles her heroine's-and Kate is a funny, warm character who could have popped out of a Jennifer Weiner novel. The book is overlong, and the plot wanders from place to place, but the humor and good-natured banter make it worth the ride. Agent, Richard Barber. (June) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.