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FASHION VICTIM
by Chloe Green
Kensington, December 2002
279 pages
$22.00
ISBN: 1575667150


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

I wanted to be IN this book. I couldn't figure out which character I could be, because all of them have jobs for which I am totally unqualified and unsuited. But I still wanted to live in this book, at least until I got way too sunburned to live. Which didn't happen to anyone in Fashion Victim.

Dallas O'Connor is a fashion designer, hired by some unknown high muckery-muck in a record company to come up with "the look" for a new all-girl band, Fate of Paradise. This means she has to come up with all the clothes and accessories for each of the five women in the band. Plus "the look" has to go together, work together, all the time. Complex doesn't begin to cover it. Fate of Paradise is making their first video on a small tropical island, complete with castle.

The band consists of Eladonna, Ka'Arih (pronounced Carrie), Rozima, London, and Jillyian. The record company had a contest to pick the members of the band, and these five women are it. Other players in the book are Donny Pedretti, the group's manager; Bette, Donny's assistant, Sascha, the makeup artist; Teddy, the dietician/exercise nazi/sleep gury/choreographer; Oscar Izarra, the incredibly foul-mouthed, divinely talented, and drop-dead gorgeous chef; and his sous-chef/adversary Palize. It's a diverse group, both in terms of ethnicity and backgrounds.

Dallas thinks she has died and gone to heaven. Fate of Paradise seems to have good chemistry, which Ka'Arih believes derives from the fact that the group (band and entourage) have all the elements of "the enneagram", which has to do with personality types: "Every organization, in order to do everything and meet everyone's needs, has to have all the nine types in it. That's how it will be successful." The support people (Donny, Sascha, Teddy, and Dallas) work well together; the lack of ego-connected posturing is actually pretty unreal for any group with that many people working together. The setting is divine - decadent, tropical, secluded. The food is fabulous. Whatever Dallas needs to do her job is available, or can be gotten. Money isn't a problem.

Of course, this is too good to be true. Dallas is out on her daily early morning run on the beach when she comes across a dead man. She is pretty sure he was murdered because his hands are tied together. When she goes back to get the others, nobody believes her and then the body isn't on the beach any more. Dallas finds out that she is the forty-third stylist hired for this gig. What could possibly make forty-two other people quit or get fired?

Dallas is very attracted to Oscar, and the feeling seems to be mutual. However, Dallas has been burned more than once in her romantic past by men of Hispanic origins and she is reluctant to have more than a surface involvement with Oscar. Oscar is a man of tempestuous temper, of passion and moods. He is not interested in playing around.

There are other undercurrents. Donny seems to be having a torrid romance with Jillyian. But is she his only interest? Who is Sascha, really? And what of Zac? Zac is a blast from Dallas's past - a sometime FBI agent who shows up on the island as one of the band musicians. Is he here on a case? Is he really "just" a musician? He's here, he's gone, he's back again. Will he come between Oscar and Dallas? The voodoo elements in the story work well, and I suppose the hurricane is only stretching the credibilty envelope a little bit - nobody gets hurt and there is surprisingly little property damage to anything vital to life as we know it. The electricity goes out, but the food/wine/drugs continue. And all the clothes fit everyone all the time.

I enjoyed this book. It made me feel incredibly uneducated in terms of fashion and designer attire; that didn't detract from my enjoyment of the book. I suspect that someone more up on all the names will have a much better idea of what people were wearing than I might, but I have a mental image of what Fate of Paradise looked like. Fashion Victim was a wonderful book to take me out of my snowy, blustery, very cold afternoon and into a world I've never known. The mystery is almost peripheral, and that didn't matter to me. I was having such a good time without it.

Reviewed by P.J. Coldren, February 2003

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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