Stars Shine Down » (Reissue)

Sidney Sheldon's remarkable career as a novelist began when he was 50 years old, after he had already been a success in film and television. Perhaps it was his sensibility for screen entertainment that made him so readily able to produce his addictive novels of love and suspense.

In THE STARS SHINE DOWN, Sidney Sheldon returns to the powerful and classic themes that have made him one of the world's most popular bestselling authors. And in Lara Cameron, he has created his most memorable, richly drawn heroine to date. Lara is America's Princess, the power behind the tallest building on earth, a self-made billionaire who towers over a traditionally male domain, an icon of glamour and accomplishment to men and women everywhere. Beautiful but insecure, ruthless yet vulnerable, Lara has struggled brutally to achieve it all — yet still wants more. And in a dazzling global setting from London to New York, from Reno to Rome, she will find everything she has ever desired and won — her fortune, her fame, the man she loves — swiftly and shockingly imperiled.

Publishers Weekly

Imagine Donald Trump as a drop-dead gorgeous woman and you'll have an approximate image of Lara Cameron, the heroine of Sheldon's latest--barely tepid--potboiler. A super-successful real estate developer, Lara has made millions of dollars--and a few enemies--in her ascent from a childhood of deprivation to the upper echelons of the business world. When she falls in love with a renowned concert pianist, she sets about ``winning'' him as she would a prime piece of waterfront property. But her ties to a lawyer with Mafia connections and her shady way of doing business threaten her happiness and eventually her income and reputation. In settings that vary from Canada to Chicago and New York, bestselling novelist Sheldon ( The Other Side of Midnight, Rage of Angels ) brings real zest to the high-stakes poker game that provides the novel's backdrop. But his pancake-flat characters are as insubstantial as the paper fortunes that drive the real estate business. Moreover, the characters have an annoying tendency to speak in overwrought cliches; sounding for all the world like Scarlett O'Hara, young Lara laments, ``Someday . . . I will have my own land, and no one--no one--will ever take it away from me.'' Frankly, by the final chapter, readers won't give a damn. First serial to Cosmopolitan; Literary Guild main selection. (Oct.)