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Title/Author

In The Red

Susannah Jowitt

Average Review Rating Average Rating 7/10 (1 Review)
Book Details

Publisher : Coronet

Published : 1998

Copyright : Susannah Jowitt 1998

ISBN-10 : PB 0-340-68057-1
ISBN-13 : PB 978-0-340-68057-5

Publisher's Write-Up

As New Labour romps to victory, three old friends celebrate twenty years of comradeship. But life is more complicated since they were ten-year-olds smoking behind the bike sheds.

Will Hallie ever emerge from a cycle of demoralising one-night stands to reinvent herself as PR guru and femme fatale? Will frustrated housewife Nina escape her stifling marriage via the mysteries of the Internet? Will the heartbreaker Cass who's just returned from New York to work at the House of Commons, ever be able to conquer her demons and fall in love for real?

Separately they're a disaster waiting to happen but, if they manage to stop bickering long enough, the troubled trio might just be in with a chance to solve their man-troubles, rescue their friendship and save the political day.

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Reader Reviews

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Review by Chrissi (010402) Rating (7/10)

Review by Chrissi
Rating 7/10
This is not really a topical book now, but I read it anyway, after finding it and remembering that I had read "Out of my Head" by the same author.

The plot of this surrounds three women, Hallie, PR woman and doormat, Nina, trying to be a country dweller and hating it, and Cass, recently returned from America after a disastrous experience with men. It takes this book ages to get anywhere with the plots or characters of these women, and I have to say that I got a bit hacked off in the opening pages, because I thought that it was rambling all over the shop except the story.

It gets its title from the first heady days of the New Labour administration, before we realised that they were all politicians, and all as bad as each other. (I have my own personal theory that anyone wanting to be an elected politician should not be allowed to run on principal. We should elect people without their knowledge, because we feel that they would be good at it, and force them to hold office for a period, and before they go mad or develop delusions of grandeur, we should humanely shoot them - be best for us all in the long run!)

Cass finds herself knowing about a scandal involving the love life of the MP that she works for, and she and the other two set out to prevent an unsuitable person from taking an office that they would be unsuited to. Unfortunately this takes only the last third of the book.

Just one point - in both books there is a woman called Annalisa, who is a petite brunette with the predatory instincts and the sexual morals of a tomcat - I have to wonder whether this is a coincidence, and if this person is based on someone that the author knows - revenge in print maybe?
Chrissi (1st April 2002)

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